DHL and other noise makers

Next up on the chopping block during the city's express train called Riverside Renaissance is another piece of its history, the Dairy Queen located on California Square which will soon be nothing more than just a fond memory for many who frequented the walk-up business.

The Press Enterprise published an article about its proposed destruction.

Why does the historic ice cream stand have to go?

Probably because it's not the happening spot in Orange County. Dairy Queen will still exist inside the mall area somewhere but the stand will be demolished.


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Although Dairy Queen will be housed in one of the new retail spaces, it won't be the same, Lewandowski said.

"I have memories of coming here on summer nights when other families would gather here," she said. "Children would play by the building while people sat on the benches enjoying their ice cream. It was wonderful."

Roy Sanchez said he was trying to organize a group of customers to lobby for the building to be listed as a landmark when he was felled by a stroke. He is now recovering.

"Everybody goes to that Dairy Queen. Everybody connects to it," Sanchez said. "Every Friday and Saturday night, it's packed."

Owners Robert and Terry Reinhardt said they can understand the emotional ties the community has to the building, but there is little they can do.

"We fought long and hard to save the building, but it was futile," Robert Reinhardt said on a recent morning, as he took a break from preparing to open for business. "It's not something the city wants."




It probably wouldn't work to try to have it listed as a historic building. After all, the city had just pushed the owners of another historic business, the Kawa market, to sell their digs. And an ice cream stand certainly isn't upscale enough for this Orange County wannabe city.

And it's not like the city has never demolished old buildings which were part of its heritage. It's not like the city hasn't even tried to either demolish or manhandle the Cultural Heritage Board which is the volunteer body which provides input in the issues of older buildings.





Columnist Dan Bernstein of the Press Enterprise wrote about the recent raids of medical marijuana dispensaries in Riverside County. He compared them to the picking of low hanging fruit in trees.


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"Ever hear of medical marijuana dispensaries?"

"Who hasn't?"

"Low-hanging fruit. Everyone knows where these places are. Everybody knows what they do. They operate in broad daylight. In shopping centers! They might as well set up a booth in the DEA lobby. Oh, and the 'customers' aren't exactly armed and dangerous."

"So busting dispensaries is kind of a working holiday for the DEA?"

"You know how miserable it gets here in the summer. This is not the time to be rooting around in some ship hold, sniffing out Afghan opium."

"This is the time to be picking low-hanging fruit?"

"Now you're getting it. They make the busts. They make the headlines. And they get paid. Nobody gets hurt."

"Except maybe the people who can't get their marijuana."

"We're in a drug war. When you're in a war, there's always collateral damage."

"I've never thought of cancer patients that way before."





In Los Angeles County, it's been the DEA. Out in the Inland Empire, it's been the local law enforcement agencies working with federal agencies including one raid that took place in Riverside last May. So now the Inland Empire is known for its medical marijuana raids, not its methamphetamine.

When I was visiting my family and some guests of one of my sisters realized I was living in Riverside, they said that you could never be too careful of the people in that city because they were all using methamphetamine. That's probably not true, but that's the image of this city.


It's always interesting to read columns like this and think back to having to wait three months for the police department to even check out a suspected meth house hopefully before it blew everything and everybody in the vicinity sky high as meth labs often do as incidents have shown.

Of course by the time two officers dressed in 1970s outfits and wearing shaggy beards and even shaggier hair came out to take a look, the lab apparently had packed up and left. When gentrification came to the neighborhood in the late 1990s, the men in 1970s clothing and wearing shaggy hair moved in and stayed for about a year. They were polite and mostly kept to themselves.

Back then, the federal government declared marijuana as its drug of choice to launch a war against, when methamphetamine was spreading across the country like wildfire. It's too bad the federal government can't launch a war on methamphetamine production and sales like it has on medical marijuana dispensaries. But then maybe there's a point to what Bernstein is saying.

Whether you agree with medical marijuana use or not and I'm on the fence because I abhor marijuana, illegal drugs and more than a few legal drugs but am not convinced that this is a practical or viable use of federal and local resources, this subject will probably get much more debate in the months and years ahead as more and more states pass medical marijuana initiatives. Especially as people consider their feelings about the idea of terminally ill and other patients getting guns stuck in their faces by law enforcement officers, including one who allegedly told a woman later on the phone in Riverside.


"I am the judge and jury."


A couple of constitutional amendments be damned. The judicial process might be slow and in some cases ground to a standstill in Riverside County but last I checked, it still existed.


In Riverside, people protested the recent raids in the Inland Empire. The Press Enterprise has a survey on this issue as well.






In San Bernardino County, information about political candidates and their campaign contributions will soon be appearing online according to this article in the Press Enterprise.


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Residents will be able to search by candidate, donor or date and see who is giving to whom and how much. And they'll be able to see where each candidate is spending those campaign funds.

"We want to be as transparent as possible," Supervisor Gary Ovitt said.





Hopefully, Riverside will not be the last city to provide this valuable service and will be next in line but unfortunately, accountability and transparency aren't two of its most esteemed qualities as recent changes at City Hall particularly those governing city council meetings have shown. Not to mention being on the receiving end of a harassing email in my name which apparently originated from an IP address registered to the city of Riverside with its address at City Hall. Inquiries into this matter were met with condescension and an army of strawmen arguments from the city's head public information officer.

So no, accountability is not one of this city's strongholds. But this might change at least a little bit with the publication of campaign contribution statements submitted by the city's political candidates.

As of now, you have to go to the city clerk's office to request the hard copies of the candidates' campaign disclosure records which include this same information. If you have time to do so during business hours, it is a recommended practice to help make an informed vote.

Of course if this information were available online, then it would be accessible to more people. City Hall's motto has been, anything San Bernardino County can do, we can do better. Well, San Bernardino County has gone off and done this so Riverside needs to implement the same program as well. Whether it does so remains to be seen.






DHL's plan to ground two of its worst offenders in terms of aircraft that keep several neighborhoods up all night is being discussed at the Press Enterprise's latest poll. Actually it will be if someone actually starts it off with a comment.

The majority of the noise makers in the DHL fleet are ancient DC-9 airplanes which aren't even in production anymore.

That newspaper's editorial board takes the city council particularly councilman and aspiring county supervisor, Frank Schiavone to task for political ploys it stated were being used against DHL including civil litigation.


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But Wednesday's announcement was less about noise than politics, which undermines any public celebration of DHL's commendable steps. Airport noise has become a battleground issue in a county supervisor's race, which has made rational discussion of the issue nearly impossible.

The carrier's proposal, for example, comes as Riverside city officials threaten to sue the cargo operator over aircraft noise -- at the behest of a Riverside councilman trying to keep noise complaints from derailing his supervisorial campaign.

But the city's threat rests on bald hypocrisy. DHL, after all, is merely following the operating agreement approved in 2005 by the March Joint Powers Commission, which oversees civilian use of the airfield. Two Riverside City Council members sit on the commission; both backed the DHL project. And the commissioners understood that the DHL operation would involve night flights and airplane noise when they approved the cargo project, regardless of erroneous flight maps or any other information that emerged later.

So now the city would consider spending taxpayers' money in a court battle over cargo operations that city officials approved? Riverside officials say the city's legal threat brought DHL's concessions last week. But the city's bullying of the cargo company also directly serves a city councilman's supervisorial campaign.



The litigation against nightly noise-making flights comes from a city council member which includes members who voted to bring DHL to Riverside and Moreno Valley knowing full well that DHL was going to fly its planes out 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Just like nothing stops the U.S. Postal Service, nothing stops DHL. If the bosses at DHL are very confused at what has been threatened against them after having received the welcome wagon to come to Riverside, I wouldn't blame them.



First the carte blanche welcome mat, then the threatened law suit. In between was a game of hot potato over proposed flight paths between Riverside, Murrieta and an attempted round involving several cities in San Bernardino County that predictably failed after those cities looked at what Riverside was trying to do with its noise problem and said loudly the following very loudly.



Hell no!


So Riverside was stuck having to deal with its own noise problem and many city residents were forced to go out and purchase ear plugs to get through the night while people including politicians told them that the noisy nights were apparently all in their heads. But the noise is real, because the airplanes that produce it are real. DHL is not only real, but really here in Riverside County.

And the politicians in this county should know this because they fought the cities of Ontario and San Bernardino to get it here. And is bringing business in the area a bad thing? Is DHL a bad thing?

No, although politicians told city residents living in the flight path that they were being party poopers by protesting against the company's arrival and installation at MAFRB.

What was bad was the process, including deception and outright lying over the proposed flight path and then the double talk when this deception came to light in an embarrassing fashion.




Why mention the election next year for county supervisor?

Frank Schiavone who was one of those councilmen is running against incumbent supervisor Bob Buster who cast the sole dissenting vote against the nighttime flights, which have essentially doomed residents of Orangecrest, Mission Grove and Canyoncrest to sleepless nights for months. To decide to file a law suit now against something that Riverside knew was coming and was in fact anticipating seems somewhat self-serving for the city council. After all, several of its members including at least one running for political office decided to push forward on despite protests from community members and organizations from these three neighborhoods and others on the always changing flightpath used by DHL out of March Air Force Reserve Base. I remember how those community members were ridiculed and treated by elected officials as standing in the way of progress when all along, they were right to be concerned from the beginning.

To bring a 24/7 air freight company into the area and then sue it for making too much noise at night, is just, well there are really no words to adequately describe what it is.

Many people including Cindy Roth, president of the Riverside Greater Chambers of Commerce oppose the proposed litigation.


(excerpt)


Decisions that brought DHL to March and efforts to address the noise problem are expected to be a polarizing issue in that race. Many of the March commissioners have said they will support Schiavone's run against Buster.

But they showed no support Wednesday for Riverside's threat to take DHL to court if the company does not abate its early-morning airplane noise.

Richard Stewart, a Moreno Valley councilman and March commissioner, said DHL had done nothing wrong and the commission is responsible for finding solutions to the noise.

Local business leaders also urged Riverside's elected officials to drop their threats of a lawsuit, saying such a stance casts a pall over business activities across the region.

"DHL is a victim here, too," said Cindy Roth, president of the Greater Riverside Chambers of Commerce.






It's too bad Roth doesn't advocate nearly as strongly for the somewhat smaller businesses that the chamber purportedly represents who were pretty much forced out of the downtown in Riverside through threats of eminent domain.


They were victims too.



It's not clear who all is running in the supervisory race next year. Former candidate Linda Soubirous had expressed interest in this race before she hit the express highway to a spot on the Community Police Review Commission which will probably keep her too busy to think about running again for political office for a while at least. Soubirous was a candidate heavily backed by many law enforcement unions which belong to CLEAR, including the Riverside Sheriff's Association and the Riverside Police Officers' Association.



Now I suppose if the unions want to face off against Buster's apparent support of current Sheriff, Bob Doyle again, they will probably take a combined war chest which is at the six-figure level elsewhere. But if it's going to be a repeat of 2004, we'll have to wait and see, who's "elsewhere".



At any rate, it looks like before there will even be a conclusion to this year's civic election, Election 2008 has already begun in earnest. Hot dogs, cold drinks and popcorn will be on sale soon.




The Press Enterprise still has that ongoing poll on the DHL plan to ground two DC-9 airplanes in its fleet. You can visit it here.






I saw the film, Zodiac which was a film that came out last year about the Zodiac killings of the 1960s and the impact it had on three men, either journalists or police detectives, involved in the case.

One segment of the movie dealt with the 1966 unsolved killing of Cheri Jo Bates, at Riverside Community College. More about the Bates case is here. Two of the characters played by Robert Downey, Jr. and Mark Ruffalo were fighting outside the police station in a location that didn't actually look much like Riverside about whether or not the Zodiac Killer murdered Bates, a question that remains unanswered over 40 years later. But the Riverside Police Department investigating the Bates case at the time believed it was a local individual who committed the crime though the Riverside County District Attorney's office wouldn't file charges against that individual.