River City Hall: Adventures in ethics

"It's like running your car 100 miles per hour seven days a week. Eventually something is going to give out,"


---Southern California Edison spokeswoman Vanessa McGrady, to the Los Angeles Times.



"I want to make it real,"

---HRC Chair Omar Zaki, about Riverside's inclusive community statement.


"Do you want to hear an African-American joke?"

--one city employee to another, in 2007.





Labor Day was another hot, humid day, but at least in Riverside, the heat was broken by a brief rain shower in the afternoon which brought some relief to those who have sweltered during the past week for at least 20 minutes. Yesterday's temperature was 112 degrees in Riverside, which meant that the city without intending to had provided free sauna facilities for anyone within its boundaries.

In Los Angeles County, over 23,000 customers lost electric power, according to the Los Angeles Times. All of them are Southern California Edison customers from Long Beach to Lake Elsinore. Temperatures are expected to decrease markedly during the next couple of days, until they reach a more seasonal level, which means they will only hit the high 90s.






Love it, or hate it, here's your place to talk about SmartPark. As you know, the controversial program regulating parking downtown is undergoing some changes as of late. That's typical of plans and programs that were approved under one form last year, and then changed this year when the city residents protested their implementation during an election year. Hopefully, these changes will provide some relief to the small business owners downtown and their customers at least for a few months.


More interesting letters on the problems of litter and utility prices in Riverside. Keep those letters coming. The contact email address is letters@pe.com.


The Press Enterprise editorial board supports Riverside's most recent move 9-11 phone calls made by cellular phones to a dispatch center within the city's limits rather than have the calls sent out to the CHP in San Bernardino County. This should ease some of the delays that people encounter when they use their cell phones to call for emergency assistance.


(excerpt)



Cell phones can be life savers in cases of emergency, but not if callers have long waits just to connect with the right agency. So more cities and counties should directly answer cellular 911 calls, to speed emergency responses and improve public safety.

Wireless callers dialing 911 in Riverside will now reach city dispatchers instead of a regional California Highway Patrol center. The city on Aug. 13 finished upgrading its emergency communications center to accept the rerouted wireless calls, with the help of a $525,000 state grant.






The City Council will be interviewing four applicants for the Community Police Review Commission, but it's merely a formality as has the interview process in earlier selection processes for the respective appointments. Chani Beeman is expected to be appointed to become the third representative of Ward One and the second appointment spearheaded by Councilman Dom Betro and now, Councilman Frank Schiavone who's as much an adamant supporter of her appointment now as he was against it several months ago. This is an appointment that's been in the works for a while, some say.


If appointed, Beeman will depart the Human Relations Commission where current chair, Omar Zaki was published in this article in the Press Enterprise which provides an interesting look at his philosophy on the issues faced by the commission he heads.


(excerpt)


"There was such a gap" in understanding between the non-Muslim community in the United States and the Muslim community, Zaki said.

Islam has more than 1 billion adherents worldwide but it's the extremists who have spoken for them in recent years, he said.

The Sept. 11 attackers are not representative of the majority of Muslims, Zaki said.

"Most Muslims, including myself, look at what they did as sinful," he said.


Now as Human Relations Commission chairman, he is working to increase understanding among all racial, ethnic and religious groups in the city.




If you ever have time in your schedule, check out an HRC meeting. Zaki's a very nice guy, who appears to be a good leader of a body that hasn't gotten as much respect as it deserves. They meet on one Thursday a month and also hold meetings of various subcommittees, unfortunately often when few people can attend them. That's unfortunately a problem with most of the business done by the city's boards and commissions.



Zaki wants to make the city's inclusive community statement, "real" and he's to be admired for trying to do so. It would be great if the city of Riverside could eliminate the racism and sexism in its workplace with at least one city department in the midst of an investigation done by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and another that is in the midst of an inhouse investigation which was marred by alleged threats that were mailed out to former employees of that department several months ago that the jobs of current parks employees would be privatized among other things. Several years ago, this department had already lost a Black male employee who was fired by the city several days after filing a grievance alleging a hostile work environment which included the use of a racist slur.

Yet another city department has allegedly lost another Black employee several weeks ago, not long after this person filed a complaint with a supervisor regarding, you guessed it a hostile racial environment.

Hopefully, now that the HRC is under the umbrella of the mayor's office, Zaki and other commissioners will reexamine these issues. Perhaps, the Human Resources Board will do so as well.






Community activist and publisher of The Truth, Salvador Santana is filing a grievance through the ethics code against Councilman Ed Adkison. According to Santana and other witnesses, Adkison made comments at a city council meeting on Aug. 14 that Santana had been evicted from his residence in the past in response to comments Santana made about a proposed initiative to be put on November's ballot on the ownership of roosters.





If this took place, what was Adkison thinking? Or was he? Santana and others have said that what Adkison said was untrue. It's puzzling as to why Adkison would do this given that he and Santana appeared to have cordial relations. But at the very least, it appears to be inappropriate behavior by a city official.





On Aug. 28, Santana spoke at the city council meeting alleging that Adkison had violated the ordinance pertaining to appropriate conduct by an elected official. At the same meeting during its afternoon session, Police Officer Putman was searching through the cart which contained Santana's publications and said there might be a bomb in it. Before this, several security guards were attempting to move the cart to outside of City Hall. This is the first time in many times that Santana has brought his cart to City Hall that it was subjected to this treatment. Other people who attended the meeting said that neither they nor their properties were subject to the same kind of scrutiny through searches by police officers or security guards at city council meetings. It's hard not to see this action as being directed by Adkison, who in the past has ordered the city's police officers to either remove speakers or do other things from the dais during meetings.





I do not know Officer Putman. I've seen him at several meetings and he's been polite and professional to people as many of the officers assigned to the meetings have been. I do not believe it was his choice to search Santana's cart. If it's the elected officials or city staff members who are suddenly ordering police officers to do so, there needs to be some examination of this issue.





Several police officers bravely came forward at a meeting of the Group last year and spoke about what had happened surrounding the attempted eviction of several city residents from a city council meeting last February and the actions of Deputy Chief Dave Dominguez to address it without arresting people, an action that may have had repercussions for him politically. This included the attempted eviction of Marjorie Von Pohle who was 89 at the time and said she would have to be carried out.





Santana plans to take his grievance through the ethics committee process, but he's wasting his time even as the city appears desperate to resolve this matter. First of all, there's a good chance that his complaint would be tossed out on a technicality courtesy of the city attorney's office after a period of time spent contemplating it. After all, who employs the city attorney? The city council including Adkison.





If it does survive that far through the process, it will go to the Mayor's Nomination and Screening Committee which is looking more and more like an exercise in good theater anyway. What will happen is that another council member will substitute for Adkison who will be forced to recuse himself just as fellow committee member, Betro did when he received a complaint. The committee will spend most of its time talking about how restrained Adkison was and what a bad person Santana and it will determine that Santana's complaint is unfounded. Even if Adkison did slander Santana on Charter Communications television, it doesn't matter. The process is set up by the council members in a way that protects their interests, not those of the city's residents, because the council members are left to policing their own conduct and what happens if there is potential misconduct.

That's why there should be an independent committee comprised of city residents to review ethnics complaints involving elected officials. When this suggestion was made during a recent evaluation of the ethics code and complaint process at a Governmental Affairs Committee meeting, it was not surprisingly, vetoed by the city council members on that body.




Three out of four of the members(all of whom are from the BASS quartet) of the Mayor's Nomination and Screening Committee have garnered most of the complaints about how they treat members of the public. Several have ordered very embarrassed police officers to remove elderly women from the meeting.




The sensible thing for Adkison to do if the allegations are true is to apologize to Santana both personally and on television. After all, they use the fact that the meetings are televised to present their agendas, one of them can use it to apologize for misconduct. Adkison is certainly capable of doing so, as he's probably the person on the dais who's more akin to apologize than most of his colleagues. I know that from personal experience and he can be gracious in doing so.





Often, I think that elected officials upon getting elected forget who put them there. Who put them in those positions were those who cast votes in their respective wards, not those including out of town development firms who put money in their campaign coffers then knock their office doors down the rest of the time. It is up to city residents to remain engaged in the process through their votes and through expressing their views on the various issues that come before the city council.




Will the Springboks meet up with the All-Blacks in the finals? Stay tuned! Hopefully, if so, this time the All-Blacks team won't all come down with food poisoning before the final round.


Trivia: What world champion Rugby team played a non-test match against the United States team in Riverside? Who won?