River City Hall 101: Rules and resources

(Part of an ongoing series)

Someone from the Human Relations Commission passed along information about a forum tomorrow at Riverside Community College on Magnolia which will be held involving candidates from all four wards up for election this November. It's held at the new library from 6-9 p.m.

With two candidate debates tonight at different venues, you'd think there wouldn't be enough room or time for a Mayor's Night Out but one's being held at the Northside today. It will be interesting to see how Councilman Dom Betro who represents that neighborhood divides his time.



Mayor Ron Loveridge, council members and city staff will meet as Mayor's Night Out visits the Northside Neighborhood today at Fremont Elementary School, 1925 N. Orange St.

Attendees may converse with city staff from 6:30 to 7 p.m. to discuss projects and programs in the neighborhood. A 7 p.m. question-answer time with the mayor and other city leaders is scheduled. The event begins with hors d'oeuvres, provided by KH Metal & Supply.

Information: 951-826-5813.

--Marlene Toscano

mtoscano@PE.com






The Press Enterprise doesn't really write much about city council meetings anymore and some meetings, they don't seem to send reporters to even attend them. But then maybe given that most recent meetings have been well, brief that the amount of space given to them is appropriate.

Briefs are what they do write to detail the actions of the city government. Even the attendance of dozens of senior residents for an annual hearing on rent control for mobile homes only resulted in a short article of a few lines of text.

But that's an unusual event, as few people attend city council meetings, in part because many people feel like the decision making takes place in other venues besides the city council chambers on Tuesday afternoons and evenings. Others watch the meetings on Charter Communication's governmental channel which airs them live and also in reruns twice a week. It's interesting being approached in a store and the person will say they saw me at a meeting even when City Manager Brad Hudson had the brilliant idea of only showing speakers' backs and then ask me questions about what happened, express concerns about what the city's doing and then shake their heads at some of the conduct they've seen on the dais especially in the past six months. Many of these people do not attend meetings but they do vote.


Many have questions about what state laws govern conduct at meetings and the access city residents have to documents related to city business. The California First Amendment Coalition is an excellent source of this information. Included at this wonderful Web site are the following.


The Ralph M. Brown Act

The California Public Records Act(pdf version)

Proposition 59(November 2004)


Commonly asked questions and answers

Brown Act and CPRA letter templates



The above Q & A page addressing commonly expressed issues involving the Brown Act, which applies to public bodies or private bodies created by public entities in certain circumstances, is a very helpful to start if you have questions on this state's "sunshine" law.

It is very important to learn these laws and study them, because you will need that knowledge when the local government acts in ways that assume that a member of the public won't be aware of the existence of these laws let alone what they mean. An uninformed populace is what is counted on.

For example, City Attorney Gregory Priamos provides legal interpretations of certain laws when denying CPRC requests which are counter to the text of those laws, including a subsection of P.C. 832.7 which allows for the public release of statistical information on complaints to the police department including the allegations and dispositions of those allegations. Other cities willingly provide this information and in fact, Riverside itself used to release quarterly reports on statistical information from the Internal Affairs Division to the Human Relations Commission until it ceased in 2002.

Priamos is there to follow orders of those who vote to keep him employed so obviously those individuals giving him the orders to provide legal interpretations which conflict with those given in other cities which happily provide the same information on request for whatever reason want to keep information from the police department restricted for reasons known only to them. It's a bit perplexing about what is in this statistical information that the city doesn't want anyone to see but it clearly doesn't. After all, the cities of Santa Rosa, San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland and Berkely for example provide information even more detailed than statistics and they are legally able to do so.

Riverside can, but doesn't and that can fairly or not lead to speculation that those numbers are ones that it sees problems with putting on display. One would think that after exiting a five-year period of stipulated judgment that the city would be more than eager to increase transparency to this tax-supported public agency, not less.

Apparently, Priamos and those who give him his marching orders don't agree.


There is a lawyer hotline for information gathering purposes only in case you are trying to access a public meeting, find out about public meetings or most commonly, access public information through the CPRA request and are receiving responses from the city attorney's office which don't quite smell right.

If you need assistance finding lawyer to help you, a form is available for you to fill out and submit for this assistance.

When Terry Francke was in charge of this organization, the response times for requests were much quicker than they are now. Francke left CFAC to head a newer organization for government watchdogs called Californians Aware. This Web site also has a legal search engine but alas, no lawyers practicing this type of law can be found in Riverside.

Its members do audits including a well-publicized one involving the ability to access documents from law enforcement agencies. On this page, you can look up your law enforcement agency to see if it makes the grade.


For example, the results for the Riverside Police Department are here and this audit ws performed by Martha Sarabia from the Press Enterprise. This department received an oral score of C and an overall score of a D+. Few people were surprised, but actually this was one of the higher scoring law enforcement agencies in the Inland Empire as the list will show.

This one tested accessibility to state agencies.




One means of redress is the city's ethics code which was adopted by the city after voters passed it in November 2004.


The city's Web site has this form that its employees and the public can fill out to report violations of ethics and fraud. It even includes a hotline to call and report them.

The information here makes it clear that this complaint process has little to do with the ethics code passed in 2005. There's nothing on the city's site about the ethics code process that's easily accessible.

This is hardly surprising, but it's academic because the ethics process that evolved from the passage of the ballot initiative in 2004 has no teeth. Four known complaints were filed, with only one going before the Mayor's Nomination and Screening Committee and three others being rejected by the city attorney's office.

In one recent case, the councilman involved allegedly engaged in the same behavior that was listed on an ethics complaint filed against him within days after a letter was sent out stating to the complainant that the complaint had been rejected.

Minute records for the only complaint to be heard in front of that committee are here.

What's happened through its implementation is that the city attorney's office has become the arbitrator of ethics complaints rather than the Mayor's Nomination and Screening Committee. But again, according to the chain of command flow chart of City Hall, Priamos works for the city council and if the city council had any interest in regulating its own behavior rather than that of the public, there wouldn't have been an ethics code passed. But once the will of the voters got into the city council's hands to mold as it saw fit, the instinct for self-protection came first. Consequently, you have an ethics code that actually serves to shield the elected government from accountability, instead of increasing accountability.

But ethics code processes even failures like the one in Riverside do serve as good litmus tests when scoring the ethics of an elected body precisely for these reasons.



In Murrieta, a city where elected officials attack each other on the dais rather than the city residents who criticize them, the ethics code has divided the city further according to most parties.


(excerpt, Press Enterprise)


Council members struggled over how to conduct the ethics proceedings, which both lasted more than two hours.

Residents squared off, some calling the councilmen unfit for public office, others saying the policy was a political tool.

Speakers also criticized the three levels of public reprimand -- admonishment, sanction and censure -- and said the penalties were just slaps on the wrist.

The council members also used city ethics against each other.

At his ethics hearing Tuesday night, Enochs suggested Gibbs and McAllister should be in his place for actions that could have violated the code.

For example, Enochs said McAllister took campaign contributions from developers and did not excuse himself from votes on their projects. McAllister denied the allegation last week, saying the money went to a political action committee rather than to himself. McAllister added that he excused himself from one vote.



Current Councilman Art Gage said during the last public candidate forum that decision making was often done at the Sire's Restaurant. Some say it's the Falconer but that's too close to City Hall. Can you picture Councilman A trying to persuade Councilmen B and C to approve a development project while asking one of them to pass them the steak sauce or a cold beer?



It could go like this.


A: Oh, that housing project of 600 mansions would go nicely underneath those hills.

B: Yeah, Oh, where's the A-1? There it is. Do be a pal and pass it my way.

A: Maybe 700 mansions would look nicer. This steak is simply divine. As for A-1 sauce, bite your tongue! What sacrilege to put a sauce for mere commoners on such succulent beef.

B: My apologies. Yes, the more mansions, the merrier.

C: Did that plant just move?


[Three men put on hats and put on Groucho Marx masks and continue eating.]




Now, the Brown Act normally frowns on such gatherings, otherwise known as unpublicized meetings. But meetings between GASS members and their successors, BASS have become part and parcel of the local folklore that they've taken on a life of their own to the point that even councilmen talk about them and the Press Enterprise reporters don't check it out. Apparently, they are aware that this is going on on this front.





Yes it's true, Riverside County Sheriff Bob Doyle is vacating that post earlier than previously scheduled according to the Press Enterprise.

Doyle is leaving the building because state law requires that he begin his new position with the parole board within 30 days of being appointed.

He'll be raking in two salaries as he leaves a department in turmoil.


(excerpt)


He will retain almost 100 percent of his $216,000 annual salary as sheriff in retirement and earn another $112,000 a year in his state post.

County Supervisor John Tavaglione, chairman of the board, said Doyle has not been to work since at least early last week when a divided board appointed former Assistant Sheriff Stanley Sniff to replace him.

Doyle fired Sniff, an at-will employee, late last year without public explanation.

Tavaglione said Sniff would be sworn in next Tuesday during the Board of Supervisors' regular meeting in downtown Riverside. He had been scheduled to take office Oct. 12 or 13.

Doyle had urged the board to appoint Undersheriff Neil Lingle as sheriff. Lingle was formally scheduled to retire today but has been on vacation for several days.

Tavaglione said Assistant Sheriff Pat McManus has been running the Sheriff's Department in the absence of Doyle and other top managers.


Sure enough, after the board of supervisors meeting had been conducted, the new sheriff, Sniff, was already talking to media outlets.

Bye, Bye Bobby is the mantra by the folks over at Inside Riverside who are still celebrating the failure of Doyle's undersheriff(and some say understudy)to be the heir apparent to the sheriff's position. He lost out in a squeaker of a vote done by the county board of supervisors to fired Asst. Sheriff Stanley Sniff.

Here's another letter written about the changing of the guard.




In Fontana, city residents are expressing alarm at a change in policies of how the police department there will respond to alarms, according to the Press Enterprise. The police department is tired of responding to the many falsely triggered alarms so it's planning to verify each and every alarm with the security company before it responds.


(excerpt)


But the change doesn't sit well with several residents who addressed the Fontana City Council on Tuesday and at its last meeting, on Sept. 11.

Wayne Ruble, a retired Fontana Unified School District administrator who served on the Fontana school board from 1985 to 2006, said he's been burglarized several times at his home near Alder Middle School.

Ruble said his insurance company told him they would cancel his homeowner's policy if he didn't have alarm protection, Ruble said.

The Inland Empire Alarm Association, a trade association based in Riverside, filed suit Monday in San Bernardino Superior Court, seeking a writ that would prohibit the Fontana Police Department from instituting the "verified response" policy.

The lawsuit also seeks a court determination that the policy is illegal and unenforceable.




Riverside had its own controversy involving home alarms in the mid-1990s when a woman was raped and beaten in her home and waited for police to come and help her for the hour that she was kept captive after triggering an alarm. However, they never came because there was no record that she had paid the $25 permit fee for alarms. That incident and the explanation from the city on the lack of response alarmed many individuals as well.


Operation Raw Deal, an investigation to bust steroid users caught a New York City Police Department transit officer according to the New York Daily News.


(excerpt)


Israel Sanchez, 32, accused of selling steroids over the Internet, faces up to 30 years in prison on drug-dealing and money-laundering charges.

The 18-month investigation - which authorities dubbed the biggest steroid crackdown in history - was revealed Monday.

Sanchez joined the NYPD in December 1997 and patrolled the subways as a member of the Bronx Task Force in Transit.

He was suspended on Thursday and resigned from the force later that day, about 24 hours after the indictment was filed in San Diego.

Sanchez "must have breathed in too much steel dust working in transit," a disgusted police source said.