State of the City: Jan. 24, 2008

An officer-involved shooting at the Riverside County Administrative Center caused a lot of commotion in the morning.

A Riverside County Sheriff Department deputy, who was assigned to provide security, was asked to escort a female employee out to the parking lot and encountered a man who might have had some link to the woman. A single shot was fired and then the man got into his car, which is a silver Toyota Tundra pickup and drove out of the garage.

Neither the woman or deputy were injured. The deputy has been placed on administrative leave which is the standard procedure for officer-involved shooting investigations. His name wasn't released. I don't know if it was a friend of mine from my college days, who is stationed there.

A lot of people were standing around outside the building even though it was raining.



(excerpt)


Greg McCaffrety, of Orange County, was in the parking lot on his way to the county building when said he heard a loud pop. He said he thought it was a car backfiring until the pickup burst out of the garage and sped off.

"It's like the Wild West here," McCaffrety said. "I better get back to Orange County."

George Flores, of Riverside, and Jeannei La France, of Yucca Valley, were stuck in the county building. Yellow tape and police blocked them from their cars, which were parked in a lot adjacent to the garage.

"I've already been waiting two hours," La France said at 11:15 a.m. Thursday. "I want to get home, especially in weather like this."





Lemon Street was closed off to vehicle traffic for several hours. There were many law enforcement officers gathered on the front steps from the Sheriff's Department and the investigating agency, the Riverside Police Department. A woman was taken by stretcher into an ambulance at about 9 a.m.

Cordoned off was most of the front parking lot and the entrance into the garage.






"We are going to a new world... and no doubt it is there that everything is for the best; for it must be admitted that one might lament a little over the physical and moral happenings of our own world."


- Voltaire, Candide





"You people should consider yourselves lucky that I'm granting you an audience tomorrow instead of 20 years from now."

----Wizard of Oz



The rain didn't impact the Mayor's State of the City address which took place at the Riverside Convention Center which sold out its tables pretty fast. The event sponsored by the Greater Chambers of Commerce was well-attended, and before the event the guests milled through a room filled with exhibits of different city departments and a few interesting examples of "live" art including a ballerina on a pedestal.

Then everyone was ushered from one large room to another to begin the program. After some architecture awards, including ones given to everything from the Tyler Galleria to the Press Enterprise's new headquarters, the "Hero of the Year" award was given to a group of students involved with the SIFE program.

Then Mayor Ron Loveridge spoke as he has on an annual basis.


As the room was clearing out after Loveridge's speech, he stayed behind to talk about the first state of the city address given by the late mayor, Ab Brown that took place in the city council chambers and lasted about 10 minutes. Obviously, things have greatly changed since that date, with hundreds of people, including politicians, city employees and other city residents eating lunch (unless you're sitting in the back in the steerage section) together while Loveridge gave his speech.


A lot of it was positive, about the Riverside Renaissance, which was defined as "30 years of capital projects in five years", the University Charrette and other long-term projects, anything which Loveridge said wasn't funded through the city's general fund. Riverside had been called one of the top 100 communities for young people. During his speech, Loveridge called on Poly High School teacher and current Ward Three Councilman Rusty Bailey to help find ways for the city to better serve its youth.

But not all the news was good, because of the ongoing housing crisis, a huge state deficit more than trickling down to local governments and fears of an upcoming recession which has led to major panic selling in stock markets around the globe. I didn't hear much in the speech about what's happening with the city's budget for the 2009-09 fiscal year, though there was mention of how two of the sources of income for the city, property taxes and sales taxes, aren't going to be setting any records and in fact, will be in decline and how much less money would be in the general fund.

The Press Enterprise has finally began writing about it including the anticipated $10 million shortage.

Last year, there was some warning that the years of plenty might be coming to at least a temporary end. In fact, when outlining the 2007-08 budget, City Manager Brad Hudson said that the sales tax brought in by the city last year had declined. There was mention that there will still be utilities generated funds but given the see-saw ride that the city's just been on regarding its electrical rates.

It's not an election year, the rates go up. There's not much done to educate the public on the newer and higher tiered rates which target those who consume more electricity. Then people open up their electric bills in the hot summer months and freak out at their bills which were much higher than what had been usual or even what was anticipated. So being an election year, the rates were voted down before the November elections, but what's happened to them since the election? What do you think?

Not that it helped, because two out of the three incumbents up for election in November didn't come back. I think voters saw what was going on, how different an election year can look compared to a nonelection year.

The good news is that it's always an election year some place and in Riverside County, it is indeed an election year at the supervisor's level, so this might be a good time to go through your wish list for the county or city and throw out some things that you think need to be accomplished before the election. After all, look what happened in Riverside last year! Parks not being sold off in parcels to developers! Utility rates hikes revoked! Oh wait, at least for a little while. After the election, the carriage and horses do turn back into a pumpkin and mice.


Loveridge said that the state might be operating at a deficit of about $15 billion. The city currently had about $46 million in its emergency reserve fund. Not enough to withstand a disaster including an earthquake if one took place. But if you listened to community activist, Marjorie Von Pohle the past two years, she was up at the podium at city council meetings warning the city not to dip into its reserve fund. But dip it did, to fund other "emergencies" which weren't natural in design or even really emergencies during fiscally better times. But considering how funds are transferred from one account or accounts into this city to the next, it's difficult to trace back exactly where some of them came from. As one person said, the city manager's finance division is really good at what it does, in terms of that.


Some departments have said that they face 15% cuts, while others say that they've been asked to present two budgets, one with 5% cuts and the other with 10% cuts. If you want to get promoted in most if not all of the city departments, maybe next year. Promotions and hiring is expected to be frozen, not to mention new positions and equipment. In fact, city departments will be fortunate to hold onto what they have. But the speech didn't really touch on the cuts that the city will be facing except to say that Hudson will be cutting the budget.


But why does it feel like the money doesn't quite add up? When you think of $700 million turned $1.9 billion and even this figure won't stay still for long, you wonder where it all came from. It's all allocated right, and has been for a while, thus it's not connected to what's going on with the general fund.

That might be true, but if you've talked to city employees, it's not difficult to understand why many of them feel or wonder if the deficit and Riverside Renaissance and a host of other things are being balanced on their backs, with the communities being impacted as well. If you talk to community residents, they wonder what's going to happen to their city services.

Who can argue with replacing antiquated sewers, electrical infrastructures which have caused chronic power outages in some areas of the city and building new facilities including fire stations? It's difficult. But some of what's been called corporate welfare that's been used in this city is a bit trickier to defend in fiscally difficult times.

Who can argue against the grade separations needed so that trains from Union Pacific (which happened to be a gold sponsor of the event) don't block the city's streets for about six hours each day. Loveridge said that it was important to get the federal and state funding to assist in building the grade separations. Several of them were currently under design including one of Union Pacific's most popular parking lots, Magnolia Avenue. The Jurupa crossing, which was recently called the most dangerous crossing in Riverside County is currently under construction.


But it's the pace of these projects that have people mostly concerned and whether city services are being given the same consideration or not. That's a common theme in discussions these days. You might be painted badly for simply raising these concerns. You might be called names or have this or that said about you, but it doesn't change what's going on in the city one bit what you are called.

The acronym, DHL was invoked again, as it had been at the most recent city council meeting, during what one thought would be a rather innocuous update of the March Joint Powers Commission, which includes Councilman Frank Schiavone as its chair, Loveridge as a member and Ward Two Councilman Andrew Melendrez as an alternate. It's interesting to see how this issue has been turned on its head in recent months, with those who complained about the disruptiveness of the early morning flights out of March who weren't taken seriously. They were called things too by an assortment of players in this ongoing drama, but now at this moment, this date and time in an arena where timing is everything and never left to chance, they are martyrs of the DHL machine, the same machine that the city and county laid out the red carpet for only several years ago.

But at any rate, it's once again an election year for some folks and a time to talk about the state of the city for others and so 2008, was designated by Loveridge as the year that the DHL noise was going to stop keeping people up all night, especially since 2007 was the year the city discovered that DHL was losing major money in its domestic operations which includes Riverside County's hub.

And the announcement that the Citrus Park might be a casualty of the state budget crisis is quite sobering, given how important that park is to many people in this area. The state has to make difficult decisions with the budget but every cut to save dollars now will be paid out later in hardship. One of the first items always cut in fiscally challenged times are mental health programs but doing so will result in more serious problems as more and more mentally ill people are unable to receive treatment either residential or on an out patient basis, sobering when you consider that 1 out of every 9 hospital beds is used for someone with Schizophrenia.



That's one example of a cut made today that's felt tomorrow locally, even though the decision is made up north.



Ever since I discovered from a councilman that I had a blog in December, I have had some more interesting conversations about it on civic matters . Even more so since I began writing about the budget situation for the upcoming year. The election probably was one of the first signs of concern about the future given the ambivalent feelings about Riverside Renaissance, not so much the projects themselves as the money spent including that which isn't "directly" connected to the general fund.

The problem with the funding is how much of it isn't coming from there because it's borrowed. How much debt is the city going to be handing off to the city's residents in this and future generations? What's happening to the city's credit rating?

I guess one way to watch is to pay close attention to whether or not the Riverside Renaissance proposed expenditures keep increasing even during one of the most difficult fiscal years in the city and probably the state's recent memory. Will the city see it go far past the $2 billion mark, while everything else is being cut around it?


It's admirable in a sense to want to cram decades worth of projects from a wish list in five years but there's a reason why many cities don't do it and it was former councilman Ameal Moore who put it into words and so have many other people including several at the mayor's address.

Economies rise and fall. There are years of plenty and years of famine, and the planning for the renaissance appears to have always been and remains oblivious to these realities including the possibility and now probability of a recession. But our civic leaders act as if they're doing something no one has done before. Oh, it's been done but what usually happens is that the projects wind up taking a decade or two anyway (as it's likely in the case with the grade separation projects if there's no outside funding assistance).

And it's ironic in that Riverside Renaissance keeps rolling ahead but everyone who's supposed to staff those new buildings, are facing cuts. Loveridge had said in an earlier news article that this adding projects couldn't go on much longer because how then could the city accommodate the extra staffing and equipment needs?

These cuts and freezes occur while the city is still growing, both in surface area and in population. Through immigration given that this region of the country is still one of its fastest growing and also through annexations including the one to be voted upon involving University City. One of the perks of being annexed by the city is quicker response time for city services including public safety. But if you keep expanding the city's borders and size without expanding these surfaces, then how do things really improve? And how does that impact the rest of the city?

Writing about these issues or portraying the city as less than what's at the end of the Yellow Brick Road is akin to blasphemy in these parts and means being subjected to comments like those said by a councilman and written anonymously in so many different ways by others who did so only because they chose to do so. But a lot of people are concerned about what's going on and I think last autumn's election was partly a reflection of that concern. Not all of those individuals can express their concerns freely like other people.

And yes, I guess I do like drama, mixed with just the right touch of comedy. And at least that provided by the politics in Riverside is free until you get the bill.




More political discussions here on issues such as the downtown pedestrian mall.

Apparently, the post here on the DHL crisis from several days was removed from that site by unpopular demand. So I guess that topic is one that should receive much more focus in the future as these removals are often good litmus tests of great topics.






Columnist Dan Bernstein with the Press Enterprise takes on Temecula where a well-known play has been called obscene by some folks and there's that situation with the city council, the developer and the publication.






In Southern Riverside County, water woes have slowed down or halted several development projects. I guess it's the projects which haven't already been delayed or even halted by the current housing woes.



Three Long Beach Police Department officers say they are being retaliated against by supervisors after reporting that a department boat was being used to hunt for lobsters.




The Black History Parade in Riverside takes place on Feb. 9 and will include an expo of booths. But this Saturday will be the one in Moreno Valley and Dell Roberts will serve as the grand marshall there.