Heat Wave Watch: When will there be relief?
Shake and bake, has officially come to the Inland Empire, with temperatures expected to reach 112 or higher during the next couple of days and with the earth shaking the seismographs at 4.7, according to the United States Geological Survey. Did you feel it? If so, go here and report it.
The earthquake's epicenter was in the El Cerrito area near Lake Elsinore at 10:29 a.m. At first it sounded like a whole fleet of DHL DC-9 planes taking off and then the ground started shaking. But earthquakes are a fact of life in Riverside. Remember the duo quakes in Landers and Big Bear in 1992? There's nothing like standing in a doorway and your head is hitting the top of it, hoping that your home doesn't fall apart around you. Then watching as everyone runs off to the nearest supermarket to buy up all the bottled water.
The smaller earthquakes serve as a reminder about the importance of preparing for the larger ones. There are steps that you can take which can save you and your family members from death or serious harm in the event of a major earthquake. Seismologists say that a major quake in the Inland Empire is inevitable and in fact, long overdue. The two largest, most dangerous faults which are the San Andreas and the San Jacinto are both in close proximity to many cities in the Inland Empire.
In the event of a major earthquake, it's likely that you will not have access to clean drinking water, electricity or phone service for up to a week or longer. The Northridge earthquake which hit in 1994 caused major disruptions in these services to many residents in Los Angeles and surrounding areas.
Red Cross resources including training classes in disaster preparedness can be very helpful in the wake of a disaster as well. Many of them are free or at low-cost. Hopefully, the city does or will offer programs and incentives for people in all neighborhoods to take these courses including offering scholarships to low-income residents.
The Big Bear earthquake which hit three hours after the Landers one hit a bunch of us when we were out running ironically enough, on a street called San Andreas(after the largest fault line in the state) and it knocked some of us off of our feet. But it was the middle of a 16 mile run so you just keep going. Fortunately, Riverside received very little damage from either quake and few injuries.
But even after little earthquakes, you can hear the sirens soon after of ambulances responding most likely to calls from people suffering chest pains or heart attacks in response to even smaller tremors.
The intense heat is expected to continue for at least two more days but might be broke up by afternoon thunderstorms.
If you need to find the location of a nearby cooling center, look here.
A man who worked for the Press Enterprise's advertising division was arrested by the Riverside Police Department's SWAT team for allegedly placing the advertisement threatening District Attorney Ron Pacheco, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Chandler William Cardwell, 32, was taken into custody at his home in Perris. According to Chief Russ Leach, he had been a member of Eastside Riva for six years.
(excerpt)
The Aug. 25 Press-Enterprise ad was for a "Big Blowout" yard sale that listed Pacheco's cellphone number and home address. Proceeds from the sale, the ad said, would "benefit [the] Rod Pacheco memorial fund."
Leach said detectives served warrants for phone records at the newspaper and the phone company last week and determined that Cardwell called in the ad from his cellphone. Cardwell gave a bogus checking account number as payment, Leach said.
The ad was purchased around 4 p.m. on Aug. 24, according to officials. Earlier that afternoon, Pacheco and Riverside police announced at a news conference that they were seeking a permanent injunction against East Side Riva members to prevent them from congregating, showing gang signs, violating curfew or publicly consuming alcohol in a specified area.
More information available on the arrest and further investigation here.
City Councilman Andrew Melendrez who represents the Eastside will be calling for a community meeting this week to discuss the injunction. The police department will be represented. The Riverside County District Attorney's office which filed the injunction stated that it will not send a representative out of security concerns.
One of the hottest trends to hit the cities of the Inland Empire is how to incorporate ethics codes or ethics training into local governments. The latest to jump onto that band wagon is Murrieta! Welcome aboard!
It seems that Murrieta's city government has some history of improprieties involving its elected officials and some of its employees and this past has led to a present where local residents want some accountability in their government. It turns out there are people on the city council who have concerns as well.
Most of the proposed rules address how city government and city employees will handle development firms and proposed development projects.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise)
The latest workshop was triggered by questions from members of the City Council and the Planning Commission about how they should act when invited to talk to residents upset because of a project, developers and other city officials.
Planning Commission Chairman Randon Lane asked the new city attorney to clarify the guidelines for commissioners and council members.
"We have had some people where the questions came up whether it was OK to talk with developers and residents," he said. "We wanted to make sure we have some clarification so people could feel fine doing it."
This workshop will take place this Tuesday, at 5 p.m. at Murrieta's City Hall.
Riverside had its own foray into the ethics process by opting to adopt an ethics code and complaint process. Not so much because it wanted to do so, but because voters overwhelmingly supported the creation of such a process and its inclusion in the city's charter during the autumn election in 2004.
Of course, what was spawned out of that process has very little to do with accountability and ethics and everything to do with a dog and pony show that's not even useful to watch in terms of seeing responsible government in action, let alone experience it in action. Part of the problem was that the first time a complaint came in, which incidentally involved Councilman Steve Adams, there wasn't even a written process in place.
If you have a serious ethics or malfeasance complaint against an elected official, skip the whole ethics process and take it to the county grand jury. After all, this is what that process was set up to handle. Elected officials can't even appropriately govern each others' conduct on the dais when one of them is acting out, how can they handle the process of holding each other accountable during an ethics process?
One good idea that came out of concerned community residents is that there should be a committee comprised of city residents to hear ethics complaints. That would be an improvement to the system currently in place.
Like the Community Police Review Commission, the reality of the ethics complaint process is much more than our city government can handle at this point in time. They are currently a step behind what the public wishes for when it comes to mechanisms of independent oversight over allegations of misconduct. Even when the public through its exercise of the vote makes it clear that these things are highly valued in what they expect to see at City Hall, the city government remains behind the curve. One councilman seemed miffed and had interrupted me when he believed I was going to remind him for the umpteenth time that the city residents had voted the CPRC into the city's charter at a recent meeting, even though I hadn't even made that statement.
Maybe they just don't like being reminded of what the public wants when it runs counter to their own vision of how things should be.
That's why we don't have an effective process in place involving either right now. Both began as mechanisms of accountability and transparency demanded by the city's residents, approved reluctantly by those at City Hall and both have been made pretty much in the image to reflect the current state of that power structure. And unfortunately, the people who may have to actually utilize either process haven't had much to say about it except through their actions at the voting polls.
Needless to say, if you aren't registered to vote, you need to do so. More information on that process here.
Perhaps that is why the complaints filed in the Eastside involving police officers are apparently going through different channels than the ones set up to handle and track complaints which are in place. Complaints in that neighborhood dropped down to zero last year.
Speaking of holding people accountable in government, San Bernardino Mayor Patrick J. Morris is trying to do like with City Attorney Jim Penman, according to an opinion piece he penned for the Press Enterprise. Penman has long been a thorn in the side of city politics in San Bernardino, but since he's elected and the voters there keep putting him in office, he's stayed in power for quite some time vexing everyone while he's put together his little fiefdom.
(excerpt)
The one area where our city has failed to make progress during my first 18 months is the same area that has ultimately held back our city for the last two decades, a failure of collaboration among city leadership. Does collaboration mean there is no room for disagreement? Absolutely not -- political disagreement among elected policymakers is a fundamental underpinning of our democratic system of governance.
Collaboration, however, does require that a city's impartial legal adviser cannot maintain or foster special political relationships with certain factions of the council or employee organizations, cannot take actions or draft memorandums that attack employees or undermine department heads, and cannot attempt to push his own political agendas that set elected policymakers against each other.
Unfortunately, San Bernardino's current city attorney, Jim Penman, has done all of the above. He has fostered a bloc of council members who regularly do his political bidding, he has attempted to politically silence or undermine department heads or employees with whom he disagrees, and he has attempted to hijack the mayor and council's legislative process by interjecting either his own policy proposals or by throwing "sand in the gas tank" of policy initiatives that he believes do not further his own political agenda. Over the past two decades former mayors regularly experienced this behavior, and I have continued to receive the brunt of this conduct during my brief tenure as mayor.
In Riverside, this political strategy should actually seem fairly familiar though it's not being used by the city's attorney in this case. It should be fairly clear what corner it comes from. Here, there's no questioning of it unlike the case in San Bernardino's seat of power.
Morris, who's probably one of the most interesting mayors outside of Tom Potter up in Portland, Oregon has moved on from his stint as a county judicial officer into city government while trying to implement an ambitious plan to improve the situation in several neighborhoods there which have been plagued with violence.
Penman had his say here in the same publication where he blamed all of the problems on Morris who he admitted he agreed with 92% of the time on city issues.
(excerpt)
Several people have told me a series of attacks will be initiated against me, and complaints will be filed against me with other government agencies and regulatory bodies, during the upcoming municipal election campaign. In fact, a personal attack was made on me during a televised City Council meeting this month.
Such personal attacks are usually made against me whenever I run for office. Those false allegations raised during past political campaigns have been officially investigated and proven to be untrue.
Rather than retaliate with a personal attack, I feel that simply explaining the facts and refusing to be drawn into a combative, verbal pingpong game is a wiser option. The reason: The biggest challenge for San Bernardino leaders today is to avoid permitting election year politics to interfere with the civility that has returned to City Hall and with the progress that has been made in addressing this city's problems.
It's interesting to see them take their feud outside San Bernardino's halls of power and onto the pages of a newspaper based in the next county. It kind of makes those of us in the other county of the Inland Empire feel included as an audience in one of the mightiest power struggles to take place in San Berdoo in years.
Penman has been involved in all kinds of strange antics since being elected city attorney. Morris seems to be trying to make positive changes in the city. One major obstacle to progress in San Bernardino remains the politics playing out among those at City Hall. Enough conflicts and interesting dynamics that would have kept playwright, William Shakesphere quite happy for a while.
Still, all city attorneys are elected officials. Whether it's by the majority of seven votes as is the case in Riverside or the majority of the votes of a city, it's in a sense, an elected position. Unlike Riverside, the mayor in San Bernardino welds more obvious power on the front lines rather than just behind the scenes.
The Board of Supervisors of Riverside County need to stop fiddling with the mess involved with Eagle Mountain which will not solve the overcrowding issues impacting the county's jail facilities, according to this editorial in the Press Enterprise.
The editorial board makes a good argument that the board of supervisors shouldn't ignore the study that was conducted which advised against using the facility to house inmates.
(excerpt)
Residents also have a huge stake in the county's decisions about public safety. The county needs to spend up to $1.6 billion in the next decade to accommodate the growing jail inmate population. In recent years the county has had to grant early release to about 3,000 inmates annually for lack of sufficient jail space. Some county officials see Eagle Mountain, an abandoned state prison, as a way to ease the jail crowding.
But the report affirms that buying Eagle Mountain would be a foolish move. Supervisor Jeff Stone says the county could buy the facility and convert it to a county jail for about $10.8 million. But the study says the cost would be several times that amount. The former minimum-security facility east of Palm Springs is too remote to be cost-effective, the report adds. And as Sheriff Bob Doyle noted in 2005, the prison's dormitory-style housing cannot safely contain the county's violent inmates.
Supervisors and the sheriff rightly agree that adding jail space is the county's No. 1 priority. But Eagle Mountain is not a smart option. Residents of the fastest-growing county in the state need a candid discussion about viable plans to secure the public's safety, not closed-door meetings and hidden reports.
The earthquake's epicenter was in the El Cerrito area near Lake Elsinore at 10:29 a.m. At first it sounded like a whole fleet of DHL DC-9 planes taking off and then the ground started shaking. But earthquakes are a fact of life in Riverside. Remember the duo quakes in Landers and Big Bear in 1992? There's nothing like standing in a doorway and your head is hitting the top of it, hoping that your home doesn't fall apart around you. Then watching as everyone runs off to the nearest supermarket to buy up all the bottled water.
The smaller earthquakes serve as a reminder about the importance of preparing for the larger ones. There are steps that you can take which can save you and your family members from death or serious harm in the event of a major earthquake. Seismologists say that a major quake in the Inland Empire is inevitable and in fact, long overdue. The two largest, most dangerous faults which are the San Andreas and the San Jacinto are both in close proximity to many cities in the Inland Empire.
In the event of a major earthquake, it's likely that you will not have access to clean drinking water, electricity or phone service for up to a week or longer. The Northridge earthquake which hit in 1994 caused major disruptions in these services to many residents in Los Angeles and surrounding areas.
Red Cross resources including training classes in disaster preparedness can be very helpful in the wake of a disaster as well. Many of them are free or at low-cost. Hopefully, the city does or will offer programs and incentives for people in all neighborhoods to take these courses including offering scholarships to low-income residents.
The Big Bear earthquake which hit three hours after the Landers one hit a bunch of us when we were out running ironically enough, on a street called San Andreas(after the largest fault line in the state) and it knocked some of us off of our feet. But it was the middle of a 16 mile run so you just keep going. Fortunately, Riverside received very little damage from either quake and few injuries.
But even after little earthquakes, you can hear the sirens soon after of ambulances responding most likely to calls from people suffering chest pains or heart attacks in response to even smaller tremors.
The intense heat is expected to continue for at least two more days but might be broke up by afternoon thunderstorms.
If you need to find the location of a nearby cooling center, look here.
A man who worked for the Press Enterprise's advertising division was arrested by the Riverside Police Department's SWAT team for allegedly placing the advertisement threatening District Attorney Ron Pacheco, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Chandler William Cardwell, 32, was taken into custody at his home in Perris. According to Chief Russ Leach, he had been a member of Eastside Riva for six years.
(excerpt)
The Aug. 25 Press-Enterprise ad was for a "Big Blowout" yard sale that listed Pacheco's cellphone number and home address. Proceeds from the sale, the ad said, would "benefit [the] Rod Pacheco memorial fund."
Leach said detectives served warrants for phone records at the newspaper and the phone company last week and determined that Cardwell called in the ad from his cellphone. Cardwell gave a bogus checking account number as payment, Leach said.
The ad was purchased around 4 p.m. on Aug. 24, according to officials. Earlier that afternoon, Pacheco and Riverside police announced at a news conference that they were seeking a permanent injunction against East Side Riva members to prevent them from congregating, showing gang signs, violating curfew or publicly consuming alcohol in a specified area.
More information available on the arrest and further investigation here.
City Councilman Andrew Melendrez who represents the Eastside will be calling for a community meeting this week to discuss the injunction. The police department will be represented. The Riverside County District Attorney's office which filed the injunction stated that it will not send a representative out of security concerns.
One of the hottest trends to hit the cities of the Inland Empire is how to incorporate ethics codes or ethics training into local governments. The latest to jump onto that band wagon is Murrieta! Welcome aboard!
It seems that Murrieta's city government has some history of improprieties involving its elected officials and some of its employees and this past has led to a present where local residents want some accountability in their government. It turns out there are people on the city council who have concerns as well.
Most of the proposed rules address how city government and city employees will handle development firms and proposed development projects.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise)
The latest workshop was triggered by questions from members of the City Council and the Planning Commission about how they should act when invited to talk to residents upset because of a project, developers and other city officials.
Planning Commission Chairman Randon Lane asked the new city attorney to clarify the guidelines for commissioners and council members.
"We have had some people where the questions came up whether it was OK to talk with developers and residents," he said. "We wanted to make sure we have some clarification so people could feel fine doing it."
This workshop will take place this Tuesday, at 5 p.m. at Murrieta's City Hall.
Riverside had its own foray into the ethics process by opting to adopt an ethics code and complaint process. Not so much because it wanted to do so, but because voters overwhelmingly supported the creation of such a process and its inclusion in the city's charter during the autumn election in 2004.
Of course, what was spawned out of that process has very little to do with accountability and ethics and everything to do with a dog and pony show that's not even useful to watch in terms of seeing responsible government in action, let alone experience it in action. Part of the problem was that the first time a complaint came in, which incidentally involved Councilman Steve Adams, there wasn't even a written process in place.
If you have a serious ethics or malfeasance complaint against an elected official, skip the whole ethics process and take it to the county grand jury. After all, this is what that process was set up to handle. Elected officials can't even appropriately govern each others' conduct on the dais when one of them is acting out, how can they handle the process of holding each other accountable during an ethics process?
One good idea that came out of concerned community residents is that there should be a committee comprised of city residents to hear ethics complaints. That would be an improvement to the system currently in place.
Like the Community Police Review Commission, the reality of the ethics complaint process is much more than our city government can handle at this point in time. They are currently a step behind what the public wishes for when it comes to mechanisms of independent oversight over allegations of misconduct. Even when the public through its exercise of the vote makes it clear that these things are highly valued in what they expect to see at City Hall, the city government remains behind the curve. One councilman seemed miffed and had interrupted me when he believed I was going to remind him for the umpteenth time that the city residents had voted the CPRC into the city's charter at a recent meeting, even though I hadn't even made that statement.
Maybe they just don't like being reminded of what the public wants when it runs counter to their own vision of how things should be.
That's why we don't have an effective process in place involving either right now. Both began as mechanisms of accountability and transparency demanded by the city's residents, approved reluctantly by those at City Hall and both have been made pretty much in the image to reflect the current state of that power structure. And unfortunately, the people who may have to actually utilize either process haven't had much to say about it except through their actions at the voting polls.
Needless to say, if you aren't registered to vote, you need to do so. More information on that process here.
Perhaps that is why the complaints filed in the Eastside involving police officers are apparently going through different channels than the ones set up to handle and track complaints which are in place. Complaints in that neighborhood dropped down to zero last year.
Speaking of holding people accountable in government, San Bernardino Mayor Patrick J. Morris is trying to do like with City Attorney Jim Penman, according to an opinion piece he penned for the Press Enterprise. Penman has long been a thorn in the side of city politics in San Bernardino, but since he's elected and the voters there keep putting him in office, he's stayed in power for quite some time vexing everyone while he's put together his little fiefdom.
(excerpt)
The one area where our city has failed to make progress during my first 18 months is the same area that has ultimately held back our city for the last two decades, a failure of collaboration among city leadership. Does collaboration mean there is no room for disagreement? Absolutely not -- political disagreement among elected policymakers is a fundamental underpinning of our democratic system of governance.
Collaboration, however, does require that a city's impartial legal adviser cannot maintain or foster special political relationships with certain factions of the council or employee organizations, cannot take actions or draft memorandums that attack employees or undermine department heads, and cannot attempt to push his own political agendas that set elected policymakers against each other.
Unfortunately, San Bernardino's current city attorney, Jim Penman, has done all of the above. He has fostered a bloc of council members who regularly do his political bidding, he has attempted to politically silence or undermine department heads or employees with whom he disagrees, and he has attempted to hijack the mayor and council's legislative process by interjecting either his own policy proposals or by throwing "sand in the gas tank" of policy initiatives that he believes do not further his own political agenda. Over the past two decades former mayors regularly experienced this behavior, and I have continued to receive the brunt of this conduct during my brief tenure as mayor.
In Riverside, this political strategy should actually seem fairly familiar though it's not being used by the city's attorney in this case. It should be fairly clear what corner it comes from. Here, there's no questioning of it unlike the case in San Bernardino's seat of power.
Morris, who's probably one of the most interesting mayors outside of Tom Potter up in Portland, Oregon has moved on from his stint as a county judicial officer into city government while trying to implement an ambitious plan to improve the situation in several neighborhoods there which have been plagued with violence.
Penman had his say here in the same publication where he blamed all of the problems on Morris who he admitted he agreed with 92% of the time on city issues.
(excerpt)
Several people have told me a series of attacks will be initiated against me, and complaints will be filed against me with other government agencies and regulatory bodies, during the upcoming municipal election campaign. In fact, a personal attack was made on me during a televised City Council meeting this month.
Such personal attacks are usually made against me whenever I run for office. Those false allegations raised during past political campaigns have been officially investigated and proven to be untrue.
Rather than retaliate with a personal attack, I feel that simply explaining the facts and refusing to be drawn into a combative, verbal pingpong game is a wiser option. The reason: The biggest challenge for San Bernardino leaders today is to avoid permitting election year politics to interfere with the civility that has returned to City Hall and with the progress that has been made in addressing this city's problems.
It's interesting to see them take their feud outside San Bernardino's halls of power and onto the pages of a newspaper based in the next county. It kind of makes those of us in the other county of the Inland Empire feel included as an audience in one of the mightiest power struggles to take place in San Berdoo in years.
Penman has been involved in all kinds of strange antics since being elected city attorney. Morris seems to be trying to make positive changes in the city. One major obstacle to progress in San Bernardino remains the politics playing out among those at City Hall. Enough conflicts and interesting dynamics that would have kept playwright, William Shakesphere quite happy for a while.
Still, all city attorneys are elected officials. Whether it's by the majority of seven votes as is the case in Riverside or the majority of the votes of a city, it's in a sense, an elected position. Unlike Riverside, the mayor in San Bernardino welds more obvious power on the front lines rather than just behind the scenes.
The Board of Supervisors of Riverside County need to stop fiddling with the mess involved with Eagle Mountain which will not solve the overcrowding issues impacting the county's jail facilities, according to this editorial in the Press Enterprise.
The editorial board makes a good argument that the board of supervisors shouldn't ignore the study that was conducted which advised against using the facility to house inmates.
(excerpt)
Residents also have a huge stake in the county's decisions about public safety. The county needs to spend up to $1.6 billion in the next decade to accommodate the growing jail inmate population. In recent years the county has had to grant early release to about 3,000 inmates annually for lack of sufficient jail space. Some county officials see Eagle Mountain, an abandoned state prison, as a way to ease the jail crowding.
But the report affirms that buying Eagle Mountain would be a foolish move. Supervisor Jeff Stone says the county could buy the facility and convert it to a county jail for about $10.8 million. But the study says the cost would be several times that amount. The former minimum-security facility east of Palm Springs is too remote to be cost-effective, the report adds. And as Sheriff Bob Doyle noted in 2005, the prison's dormitory-style housing cannot safely contain the county's violent inmates.
Supervisors and the sheriff rightly agree that adding jail space is the county's No. 1 priority. But Eagle Mountain is not a smart option. Residents of the fastest-growing county in the state need a candid discussion about viable plans to secure the public's safety, not closed-door meetings and hidden reports.
posted by Five Before Midnight | 10:57 AM
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