Parks and things: Where's all the money?

Riverside's plans to develop Tequesquite Park have hit a road block. And what is it? The city lacks the money to pay for the renovation being about $8.2 million short.



(excerpt, Press Enterprise)


The $6.8 million would come from almost $120 million the city raised through the sale of certificates of participation, similar to bonds.

The funds will help build the project's first phase, but money for the second phase has not been obtained, Hudson said. City staff is seeking solutions to come up with the remaining money, city spokesman Austin Carter said.

Wood Streets resident Sandie Vedder said she wonders if there will ever be a park.

"It's never mentioned," said the mother of three teenagers. "The fear is that nothing will ever get done."

Parks and Recreation Director Ralph Nuñez said plans are moving forward.

City staff has selected consultants to create conceptual plans and the environmental documents for the project. The consultants are expected to begin work within the next few weeks, using the input gathered at last year's task force meetings, city staff said.

"We have a road map," Nuñez said. "Now we need to take that road map and come up with a plan that will work. If sufficient funding is available then we'll build the whole thing. If not, we'll phase it. The process is driven by the money we have in place and the will of the council."



Originally, the park wasn't supposed to be just a park. Parcels of it were earmarked by the city to sell off to developers to the tune of about $10 million which would then be funneled into fueling Riverside Renaissance. But being an election year last year, that didn't happen. The future of Tequesquite Park was one of the firestorms of last year's city council elections and it greatly impacted the final results in Ward One.

Now, it's anticipated that it could take two years or longer to complete the park's renovation as it was recommended by city residents including those living in the Wood Street area. Still, Ralph Nunez, who heads Park and Recreation states that the dream of Tequesquite Park will some day be realized.


(excerpt)


"We have a road map," Nuñez said. "Now we need to take that road map and come up with a plan that will work. If sufficient funding is available then we'll build the whole thing. If not, we'll phase it. The process is driven by the money we have in place and the will of the council."


What it needs to be driven by is the will of the people of this city as well because it's some of the ideas for the park provided by city residents that seem to be placed at a lower priority by the city which is blaming that on a lack of money. Still, the city stated that it will come up with strategies to fund these projects which probably means it will borrow even more money. But it's so shocking to hear after all these reassurances about how solvent the city is, that it's apparently too broke to finance a renovation of a popular park. Then again, not really that shocking at all.

For one thing, the city was telling people how much money it had last year especially for the Riverside Renaissance projects, yet for a period of time in the police department, civilian employees who left their jobs were not being replaced because there was a hiring freeze there particularly in the area which addresses customer services. It was lifted, but where did the money go? Why was it imposed in the first place if the city was so solvent?

Far from being about yelling that "the sky is falling" which somehow has become equated with expressing concern about the foreclosure crisis, the state's budget crisis and the upcoming recession, people are very concerned about the future of the city and whether or not they will be able to access city services which is of course, where the budget cuts will be. In the next few months, the city will be creating its budget for the upcoming fiscal year and hopefully will complete the final budget when the fiscal year ends in June.

Talking to police officers, they all pretty much say the same thing. "We need more bodies," meaning officers in both the field patrol division and the detectives units. Will they get them? Probably not. No new traffic officer positions are due to be created, even though they've been needed for quite a while. And there's probably going to be a freeze on promotions like will likely be the case in other city departments including possibly at least three detective positions which were left vacant by retirements.



The park's development isn't the only project that's lacking funding. The city's plans to have a developer put up a housing project on Mission Inn Avenue has also apparently stalled. Several buildings which were to be purchased by the city's Redevelopment Agency haven't been bought and paid for yet because the agency's apparently out of money. One key building on the avenue was to be purchased before the agency went at least temporarily broke.

Still, park and recreation is one city department that faces hefty cuts, some say possibly as high as 15%, and those cuts may impact the development of parks that have seen little of that. If you're concerned about the future of Tequesquite Park, you can take your concerns to elected officials or to the Park and Recreation Commission which meets once monthly. It's important to be vigilant over the long run to see Tequesquite Park become what the city residents have said they want rather than closer to the city's original vision once it decided it couldn't sell it off piecemeal to provide money to spend elsewhere.



Speaking of endangered city projects which have struck a chord in many city residents, there's a really good opinion piece in the Press Enterprise by James H. Erickson about the renovation of the downtown main public library.




(excerpt)



Both the main library and the museum will be well-served by making the most of existing sites, using what is already there. In this way, the value of the current buildings will be leveraged and new additions to both can celebrate their core functions, which are different but nonetheless valuable.

The museum's core function is to preserve and protect the community's heritage. The core function of the main library is to be the city's intellectual heart and provide access to information in all formats: print, film and digital. The museum tells us where we have been; the library shows us where we are going.

Our heritage shows us we achieve much when we have vision, as city founder John North demonstrated. Access to information in all of its forms, as library philanthropist Andrew Carnegie showed, allows people to realize their best future.

Great cities have always stretched to excel and achieve maximum opportunities for their citizens. Riverside's vision should be to achieve the best main library for the community's future, nothing less.




If the direction of this project concerns you, you can attend the Board of Library Trustees meeting which will be held at the downtown library's main boardroom on Feb. 25 at 4:30 p.m. It's also very important to keep a close eye on the development of this project as well. It doesn't appear that the city was impressed or at least willing to say publicly that it was impressed with the crowd of concerned residents who congregated at the afternoon public joint session of the Board of Library Trustees and the Metropolitan Museum Board so keeping active and involved in this issue is important if you want both projects to get the undivided attention they deserve.



Riverside's police department will be hosting a DUI checkpoint some place in Riverside. If it's like most of the checkpoints in Riverside County that have hit the press so far, it will likely be located in an area with a large Latino population. In the past, checkpoints have been held in the Eastside and Highgrove.

As always, don't drink and drive.




Heating up in Riverside County during Election 2008 of all things, is the judicial races, with five candidates vying for the judicial seat vacated by Judge Robert G. Spitzer who was removed from the bench last year.

One of them is Spitzer himself who is eligible to run for his old seat as long as his outster by the Commission on Judicial Performance is under review.

Also running for his seat are the following candidates.



(excerpt, Press Enterprise)


Also seeking the office from which Spitzer was removed are:

Anne M. Knighten, a judicial staff attorney for Riverside County Superior Court. She is a 1982 graduate of Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles and has worked for the Superior Court since 1986.

John D. Molloy, a Riverside County deputy district attorney. Molloy joined the prosecutor's office in 1997, and has handled high-profile murder cases. He is a 1996 graduate of Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu.

Robert W. Nagby, a Riverside County Superior Court Commissioner since 1998 and a graduate of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. He has been a private practice attorney and a Riverside County deputy district attorney.

John Vineyard, a private-practice attorney specializing in business and real estate issues. Vineyard is a 1989 graduate of UC Davis King Hall School of Law and a past president of the Riverside County Bar Association.



About 16 judges have refiled for election and Chief District Attorney Michael Rushton is the sole candidate so far running to fill a seat that will be vacated by a retiring J. Thompson Hanks. It should be what judicial elections usually haven't been, an exciting contest.

If all five run including Spitzer, there might be what is truly rarely seen and that's a judicial runoff to see who gets the black robe and the gavel.



More unkind cuts




Riverside County is laying off over 40 employees in the Building & Safety Department as part of anticipated budget cuts.



(excerpt, Press Enterprise)


The Riverside County Building & Safety Department had 97 filled positions at the start of the year. Effective Wednesday, the department will let go 40, mainly engineers, building inspectors and supervisors, Anderson said.

"In the last two years, we have been informing our staff of the declining revenues," he said.

"We have been upfront with them," Anderson said. "It was a hard decision to make. It was troublesome. Since there was no work for them, we had no alternative."

The level of activity in the department now is closer to what officials saw 10 years ago, Anderson said. In 2004 and 2005, the department issued about 2,000 building permits a month. Now, the department is issuing only about 800 -- 40 percent below that earlier level, he said.

The union that represents the employees disagrees with the county's assessment and believes the employees do not have to lose their jobs.

"Many of these civil engineers have been working at the county for 20 or more years," said Patrick Chandler, a spokesman for the Service Employees International Union Local 721.

"The civil engineers, when we met with them, said they had a backlog," Chandler said. "There is enough work for them to do."




Speaking of elections, the Ward Four election which will be held in 2009 is already beginning to take shape. Lots of people interested in running for what could be an open seat or an easier seat if you remember the recent case of Councilman Steve Adams who had to fight and spend a lot of money to squeak through the election process to get reelected after his brief and failed attempt at state office For those who want to run for the even-numbered seats coming up in 2009, give it some serious thought. They all need passionate and wise elected officials who put ward residents first above special interests like development firms, including those based in cities which have passed restrictions on eminent domain through the vote, in a similar fashion to what was attempted by Ken Stansbury and Riversiders for Property Rights.







In San Jacinto, the city council voted to raise sewer rates, an action that might be done in Riverside if it's deemed necessary to offset millions of dollars needed to pay off loans against a hefty sewer bond.




The Portland Mercury published this article about the former director of the city's Independent Police Review who resigned in order to write a book about swearing.



(excerpt)


“I’m just fascinated by swearing,” she says. “It actually uses a different part of the brain, and I want to link it from the level of where it comes from, all the way through to writing legislation and policies.”

Aside from the book, Stewart has also applied to a number of Oregon police jurisdictions and is still deciding whether to become a police officer—saying she would particularly like to work as a detective on domestic violence and sexual assault cases.

“When you’ve got a dedicated detective on those cases, they get solved,” she says. “But I would have to start over as a rank and file officer and I am not sure whether at my age that is something I want to do. I am still wrestling with the decision.”

“We certainly wish Lauri the best of luck in her future endeavors,” says Alejandro Queral of the Northwest Constitutional Rights Center—which lobbies the police bureau frequently. He also thinks Stewart’s departure could be a good opportunity for the Independent Police Review to sit down with the community and decide what it wants its community outreach position (Stewart’s) to look like in future.

“I disagree with Lauri’s take on the importance of the complaints process versus changing policy,” adds Queral. “You can’t have an effective implementation of policy changes unless there are carrot and stick disciplinary consequences for those policies not being followed.”






Queral is right about that. Yet even here in Riverside, there's somewhat of a disagreement among commissioners of what the purpose of the Community Police Review Commission was intended to be. Whether it's about reviewing and deciding findings for citizen complaints or whether discussing and issuing policy recommendations is "the meat and potatoes" of its operation even in cases of officer-involved deaths. One recent case involving the latter was that of the fatal officer-involved shooting of Lee Deante Brown. In that case, all but one of the commissioners voted to exonerate the officer who shot and killed Brown, yet the commission as a body released about 10 policy recommendations, many of which addressed the tactics used by both officers up until the shooting.


Pretty much all of the commissioners but one said they didn't want to second-guess the actions of both the officers as well as their tactical decisions even though as an investigative and reviewing party (as stated in the city's charter), it's actually their job to do so. Yet, that's exactly what they are doing through their policy recommendations, especially considering that there are so many of them this time in comparison to those provided in other officer-involved death cases.

There are shades of the fatal officer involved shooting of Anastacio Munoz here. Munoz was shot and killed by two officers in 2002 after allegedly driving his vehicle towards one of the officers. If you check out the section on officer-involved death reports at the CPRC Web site here, you won't find the Munoz report listed. Why? The reasons for its omission vary. Some say, it's because there was cross-contamination between public information and confidential information which is kind of backwards actually from reality.

Another reason given was that the city didn't allow the report to be released based on its content. At any rate, it was the only officer-involved death case investigated by the CPRC which didn't result in the release of any written workproduct.


What's particularly intriguing is how the commission addressed Brown's alleged seizure of the taser.



During the policy recommendation #5 which is titled "Redeploy out of danger range when possible", the following statements are made.







"Once the officers recognized that Brown gained control of the tase, it would have been preferable for the officers to remove themselves a safe distance away from Brown. The distance necessary for safety would have only been a few feet. Ellefson's taser cartridge had already been fired, so Brown was limited to contact tasing. Further, Brown was on the ground when he gained the taser."





And then under recommendation # 6, which is titled "Affect a team take down of the suspect", here are some more statements.




Brown may well have been able to contact tase at least one officer, but (as already discussed above) a minimal result would have been expected [color, mine].


How do these statements of how the commisson perceived the threat of the taser through its policy recommendations mesh with the commission's finding that the shooting was exonerated because Officer Terry Ellefson had reason to fear for his life and safety? Based on what the commission stated, all he had to do was distance himself from Brown by a few feet to be safer.

It's almost like they are trying to have it both ways. They are trying to state through the policy recommendation route, which politically is much safer, that the shooting was at the very least problematic in large part because of the tactics leading up to it. Yet, when they made the final decision even though there were serious questions raised mostly by Commissioner Jim Ward about the evidence which remain unanswered by the police department, they made their decision, which is expected to stand unless administrative material in the case which will be discussed in closed session changes their minds.

Ward raised the issue of why there appeared to be an inconsistancy between the commission's view of the shooting through its many policy recommendations and its finding issued through its public report. But then he said that there were a lot of issues with the shooting that had troubled him, including the other commissioner's dismissive attitude towards the eyewitness accounts of the shooting by employees and residents of both the Budget Inn Motel and the Welcome Inn of America where the shooting took place.


(excerpt)


"How much of a threat can Mr. Brown be on the ground with a Taser that can be used only for contact Tasing?" Ward asked in his portion of the report.


Not surprisingly, Ward's comments particularly about the officers has sparked some ire in some corners of the city. That's probably the case at City Hall as well, which has been quite active in its handling of the commission during the past two years.

The city's mind seems to be set on the case. It's finalizing a settlement with Brown's family.

More on the life of Los Angeles Police Department SWAT Officer Randal Simmons who died yesterday at 1 a.m. after being shot during a standoff in the San Fernando Valley along with four other people including three who died.