Election 2007: Last year's follies, this year's issues

Good news is here.

Next Tuesday, city residents will get to voice their views about the city's electric rates at a workshop being conducted by the city council on Tuesday, Sept. 11 at 3 p.m.

Public hearings that will be held on evenings will be scheduled for later this year to give more people an opportunity to provide input into the process before any final decisions are made.

These hearings and workshops come after the city council minus Andrew Melendrez pulled a reversal and voted to revoke a decision they had reached last December to raise electric rates and to create a multi-tier system for rate increases based on the amount of electricity used by customers. As a result of that and a lack of an educational campaign to the public, electric bills soared during July, leading to a near revolt by angry city residents.

Being an election year, which is the best of all possible times to push issues, ask for project approval and to implore your elected officials to undo votes, the utility rate increases are now a memory, at least for now. What system replaces them will be anyone's bet but at the very least, it will be one where the wealthier residents probably won't have to pay the higher rates. It remains to be seen whether those in lower income brackets will join them. Not to mention how the new power plants needed to provide electricity to a burgeoning city population will be built so during times of peak usage in this city, its residents won't be spending time in the dark.

That's the truth. I think this is one of those situations where they make it up as they move on along.






Candidate forums centering on the local elections will be coming up, so get out your calendars and set the dates. Get your favorite snacks, get ready to take notes and get on down to the forums that will be sponsored by organizations including the League of Women Voters.



This organization will be holding a forum at the La Sierra University featuring Ward Seven candidates, Councilman Steve Adams and challenger, Terry Frizzel.



It takes place on Sept. 19 at 7:30 p.m.



Things have been quiet on the campaign trail during the summer months as candidates and city residents alike took vacations and restored their physical and mental resources after the arduous preliminary rounds of Election 2007. However, things should heat up with the final rounds of this political process less than two months away.



At stake, are four council seats which were left undecided during the preliminary rounds in June. Three of the seats are currently held by incumbents while the fourth goes to the candidate who can get the most votes to replace the departing(for now) Ed Adkison.


One of the campaign issues clearly was SmartPark, the ill-advised program that the city implemented downtown which has thoroughly alienated many of its small business owners and their customers.

Salvador Santana, publisher of The Truth had gathered signatures of business owners who opposed the program and sent them to city council. I guess some members of the dais weren't too happy with that, because one of them, Councilman Ed Adkison, allegedly made comments that Santana felt slandered him. In response, Santana submitted a grievance, one that City Hall is apparently trying hard to get mediated, probably before it has to come up with some type of excuse of why it's ineligible to be heard as an ethics complaint. You can almost hear the grumbles of several councilmen from here, including several who sit on the all-important Mayor's Nomination and Screening Committee which doubles as the kangaroo court which handles these complaints.



The performance of this committee and the handling of ethics complaints in general is one reason why recommendations have been made to create a panel that at least includes city residents to hear these complaints. Until that happens, filing them under the current process is a waste of time and energy.

But SmartPark is still a topic of discussion here.



In related news, DHL has announced that it is retiring two more of its noisy DC-9s in the hopes that Riverside's residents can sleep through the night, something many people in the southern part of the city haven't been able to do for months.


The current aircraft on the block to be replaced on the nightly schedule is the notorious noise maker that takes off at 2:55 a.m., the first of the early morning flights. Many people said that of all the flights, that is the one that's the most difficult to miss, given that it sounds like a rocket blasting off in several neighborhoods including Orange Crest and Mission Grove.

And of course you know, the DHL debacle has been addressed by many elected officials, including Councilman Frank Schiavone who tried to spearhead an effort to sue the March Joint Powers Authority and Global Port.


(excerpt)


Riverside County Supervisor Bob Buster said, "We need to continue to press to get DHL out of the nighttime flights."

Buster was the only member of the March Joint Powers Commission to oppose a zoning change that paved the way for the DHL distribution center in 2004.

Frank Schiavone, a Riverside councilman and a March commissioner, said his city is holding off on its threat of litigation against DHL.

"DHL is moving in the right direction and we want to see what their goals are," he said.

"This is a good start, but it's not the ending," Schiavone said. "Ultimately, the DC-9s need to be replaced with more modern and quieter planes."


What was not explained was how this could potentially lead to some individuals who are part of both MJPA, through its commission and the city government of Riverside being treated as both plaintiffs and defendants.

It's also confusing as to how DHL will be urged to drop night flights given that the contract they signed with the MJPA allows them to operate flights 24 hours a day, and 24 hours a day means at night. It means that DHL can start its nightly concert at 3 a.m.

If there are plaintiffs in this case, it shouldn't be Riverside's city government which botched this whole thing while ignoring pleas from those concerned about sleepless nights who were right all along. It should be all the individuals who were negatively impacted by not having a good night's sleep in nearly a year. The individuals who were written off as being crazy party poopers with nothing better to do than harass elected officials in order to delay progress in this region.





If you have an honorary law enforcement badge from one of the local agencies, you might have to give it back, according to this article in the Press Enterprise.

Being hit especially hard is the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, where outgoing Sheriff Bob Doyle had given out quite a few of them including to one individual who was later prosecuted for impersonating a police officer.

Indeed, the act of handing out such badges to politicians, campaign donors and governmental employees may in itself be illegal.


(excerpt)


California law could be violated if the badge falsely appears to be authorized or "would deceive an ordinary reasonable person into believing that it was authorized, for use by a peace officer," the opinion said.

Sworn peace officers are authorized to carry guns while other peace officers, such as jail deputies, often are not.

Riverside County District Attorney Rod Pacheco this week said the practice of providing badges or possessing one has largely been unregulated in the past.

"It is my intention and obligation to enforce this law," said Pacheco. "If you are not a sworn peace officer, you do not have a right to carry a badge."

Pacheco said the law also applies to private security firms whose guards sometimes are asked to wear badges. Violating the law is a misdemeanor which could lead to a fine of up to $15,000.



At least one Riverside County supervisor, John Tavaglione believed that the practice of removing badges even from other governmental employees including code enforcement and animal control personnel might be excessive.


(excerpt)


If the law is as draconian as Pacheco interprets it to be, then Tavaglione said cities and counties up and down the state have been in violation for years.

"There's no doubt that the issuance of badges to civilians for ceremonial reasons ... is a problem. And, there's no question that in the hands of the wrong person they can be abused," he said.

But Tavaglione said a number of county employees who are authorized to enforce county rules, such as code enforcement, wear badges as a symbol of authority.

"They put their lives on the line," Tavaglione said.



I think there's a huge distinction between fire fighters, code enforcement officer and animal control workers having badges and campaign donors and politicians being given badges by law enforcement officers as some sort of status symbol.


Also in Riverside County, a former deputy in the Sheriff's Department, Danny Miller, is the focus of a campaign to have him removed from his current position with the FBI, according to this article in the Los Angeles Times.

The National Innocence Network said that Miller had fabricated evidence on a rape and robbery case in Lake Elsinore that resulted in an innocent man spending over a decade in state prison. Herman Atkins was ultimately cleared of the crime through DNA testing. A jury during his federal civil rights trial later awarded him $2 million.


(excerpt)


A federal jury found in April that Miller had helped wrongly convict Herman Atkins on robbery and rape charges 19 years ago.

The jury, seated in Los Angeles to hear Atkins' civil rights claim over the wrongful conviction, unanimously concluded that Miller had "intentionally attributed a statement" to a witness that the man did not make.

The jury also unanimously concluded that Miller had "failed to disclose" that he had "fabricated" the statement and that there was a "reasonable probability" that if he had told the truth the outcome of Atkins' trial "would have been different."




More claims for damages have been filed against the city of Los Angeles in connection with the infamous May Day incident that took place when over 60 Los Angeles Police Department officers stormed MacArthur Park, according to the Los Angeles Times.


(excerpt)


Lawyer Carol Sobel, speaking for scores of people who were in or near the park on the day when police fired rubber bullets into the crowd, said she and other lawyers would pursue a class- action lawsuit against the city and the Los Angeles Police Department.

Sobel said the move was designed to buy lawyers more time to identify all of the potential plaintiffs and to encourage people to come forward, regardless of their immigration status.

"We think that there literally are hundreds, if not thousands, of people whose rights were violated that day," said Sobel, who submitted the claims along with lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The city has 45 days to respond to the claims before a lawsuit can be filed. So far, 10 lawsuits have been filed over the incident and 258 legal claims have been submitted -- nine of them by journalists who covered the event that day.



Multiple investigations were initiated after video-taped footage of the incident where police officers struck individuals with batons and fired over 150 less lethal projectiles at a peaceful crowd inside the park.



In San Bernardino County, it happened again. A deputy was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting five women he had arrested and of taking bribes, according to the Press Enterprise.

Now, Matthew Linderman is in jail on $500,000 awaiting his arraignment on these charges. He no longer works for the San Bernardino County Sheriff Department, with its representative adding that they do not tolerate that kind of conduct in their agency.


(excerpt)


According to the criminal complaint filed in court, Linderman is accused of soliciting four bribes on April 18, May 2 and July 30, soliciting another to engage in lewd conduct on April 18, oral copulation under the color of authority on May 2 and sexual battery by restraint on July 30.
Six of the eight counts are felonies.
The five women named as victims in the complaint are identified only by their first name and last initial.
The complaint against Linderman says one woman was touched while unlawfully restrained, two were forced to commit lewd acts with each other, and one was made to perform oral sex on Linderman by threat of arrest.



The Sheriff's Department appeared certain that all of Linderman's victims have come forward, so much so that the agency has declined to release his booking photograph. Sounds like they're more upset that there might be more than five women involved. After all, Linderman had been with the agency several years and it's not clear that if he is a rapist under the color of authority, exactly when it began.



More judges might be coming to the Inland Empire if a bill passes approval up in Sacramento.


That's good news for Riverside County which is currently in the middle of a judicial crisis with over a 1,000 trials backed up and record numbers of jurors being called into service as a 12-member strike force of judges from elsewhere spend the next several months in town hearing some of these trials.

While the presence of the extra judges will alleviate some of the backlog, unless more permanent solutions are implemented, the backlog will just build back up again soon enough.







What do a librarian, a publication and a mysterious man in a blue shirt have in common? And why should the American Library Association be paying attention?