Spring foreward, not backward
Daylight Savings began Sunday morning and was greeted by two earthquakes from Fontana at about 1:20 a.m. No damage was reported. At least nothing reminiscent of the last two big earthquakes, the Landers/Big Bear shakers of 1992 or Northridge in 1994.
They say there's no such thing as earthquake weather but the twin tremors were followed by a nice, warm and breezy day. Not unusual for March.
The Ville is open as of last month but for how long? City Attorney Gregory Priamos is trying to get the ABC to take a closer look at the night spot but the owner of the Ville said that a nearby Denny's restaurant is to blame for his bar's reputation.
Riverside's centralizing its homeless services into the Northside section of the city where there are already facilities including several shelters. It's good that the city's providing these valuable services for some of its most vulnerable residents and with the economy going south and the housing market going with it, there will probably be more of these residents. However, this area of the city has inherited this responsibility for the entire city simply because it's not "special" like the Wood Streets and the Inland Empire's "cultural jewel", the downtown.
So instead the city pushes the homeless (and that's an accurate word for it) into both or either the Northside and the Eastside. The Eastside's not been really allowed much of a voice in this process and many of those who advocate for homeless services from other neighborhoods are perfectly content to do so--as long as it's not in their neighborhoods. They don't have a voice in the way that those who are downtown and those living in the Wood Streets have a voice. After all, the Wood Streets neighborhood was able to complain loud enough about Black and Latino pedestrians walking down the streets to Kawa Market, to essentially motivate City Hall to level the landmark to the ground. With it, went a piece of Riverside's history and possibly a city councilman's career.
The city seems eager now to help relocate businesses which are located in the Northside near the homeless shelters in a way that it hasn't been towards those in the Eastside which is certainly interesting.
Hal Durian asks, who's a bum recollecting the story of one homeless man who lived in Riverside in the 1980s.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise)
Some persons reading this column might have been tempted to drop out and hit the road just as Dubois did. A large number of Americans are only one or two paychecks removed from homelessness. That number will increase if the economy moves into recession.
Therefore, perhaps a bit of sympathy should be given to those unfortunates some would call bums.
Back to our subject, Dubois. The man had a college degree and was obviously intelligent. Could a counselor have found a place for him in a job less stressful than his previous position as a high school teacher?
Perhaps, instead of sleeping on the roof of the museum, he could have been a useful employee inside the museum. Possibly, after his months on the road in all types of weather, he would have welcomed a steady job and a dry, clean place to sleep.
Dubois is long gone now, but one can't help wondering if more could not be done to assist today's homeless persons. There will always be those who prefer the rough life on the road, but some could be helped through counseling and job preparation to enter the more comfortable mainstream of society.
The Press Enterprise Editorial Board is chiding the parents of students at the soon-to-be-closed Grant Elementary School in Riverside.
(excerpt)
Riverside Unified is suffering the effects of the state's huge budget shortfall. Gov. Schwarzenegger wants to cut current K-12 education spending by $2.2 billion next fiscal year. School districts have to craft their budgets long in advance of the final state budget, and thus have to work from the governor's plans in making financial decisions.
So the Riverside district faces the need to trim $23.7 million from its current $370 million general fund budget. And that task invites a series of painful decisions, which could include layoffs, scrapping programs and closing schools. Shutting Grant Elementary would save the district $510,325 a year -- though the board has not yet decided whether to close the campus.
But hauling that decision into court would saddle the district with new legal expenses. Just how does adding to the district's large financial burden help Grant or any other school? Taking legal action would also inflame tempers and divide the district at a time when it most needs consensus on the right financial course.
Grant school's supporters have every right to argue for keeping the school open. But they should make that case before the school board and the public, and not to a judge.
The editorial board should focus its attention more on why the state has a governor who is intent on balancing the state's budget and its current deficit on the backs of the public school systems. This is something that the board would do if only the current governor was not a Republican. For all the gnashing of teeth about the Press Enterprise being a "liberal" paper or the "Moscow Times", in reality it's owned by conservatives from Texas who own many other such outlets. All you need to do is check its record of spanking elected Democrats compared to its record of spanking Republicans especially in situations when they both deserve it.
The Riverside City Council's finance committee is meeting on Monday, March 10, at 3:30 p.m. on the seventh floor on City Hall. It's chaired by Ward Five Councilman Chris MacArthur and includes Nancy Hart from the sixth ward and Mike Gardner from the first ward.
Here is the report on the adjustment of user fees. The estimated recovery revenue is set at about $600,000.
It's recommended that you access this report in its pdf format because the way it's been scanned for laserfische makes it extremely difficult to read. The proposed changes impact everything from permits to duplications of the recordings of city council meetings. And in many cases, fees are going up quite a bit for the services.
One very important detail in this newly proposed program is the provision that eliminates certain fees (which stands at $260 for initial studies, streamlined administrative processes and time extension determinations) involved for filing a planning appeal on the above listed issues but all these appeals must now be approved by the city council.
The fees that are increasing in various areas of city services won't impact wealthy development firms so much but likely will impact home owners and small business owners by making it more costly to do just about anything at City Hall. Why? Because even as the Riverside Renaissance express train rolls straight ahead (with the bonus that it might become more costly for city residents to file appeals on issues impacting them), the city is balancing its budget woes on the backs of the city's residents.
This makes one wonder if the city tried to balance its budget woes on the backs of city employees by making it so fewer of them put in more hours and labor for providing basic services on everything from parks, to development to public safety and now is moving onto the residents.
At any rate, Budget 2008 is just getting started with much more to come in the upcoming months. Let the games begin.
Police officers in Rockville, Maryland are refusing to pay their speeding tickets. About two-thirds of the officers who were flagged by the cameras set up to catch speeders who weren't responding to a call for service have vetoed paying their fines.
Who should pay up for the fines is a point of dispute among different parties.
(excerpt, Associated Press)
The police union says officers shouldn't pay because the citations are issued to the owner of a vehicle, in this case the county, and not to the driver.
Police Chief Thomas Manger doesn't buy that argument.
"We are not above the law," Manger said. "It is imperative that the police department hold itself to the same standards that we're holding the public to."
Manger said officers who continue to ignore citations might be disciplined.
Here's an interesting question for an officer in Maryland. When you pull someone over for speeding, do you cite the person that is speeding or if it's a family member who's borrowing the family car and is speeding, do you instead write the citation to the owner of the car?
That's the problem with the red-light camera program in most cities is that someone might get a citation in the mail that they ran a stop light for example and it was actually their wife or daughter or son or husband who was driving the vehicle at the time.
But if the county does have to pay up on the citations, then it's clear who the buck will be passed to and that's the county's residents who already have to pay their own citations or follow the traffic laws to avoid paying for citations.
Sean Bell's family members think that Queens County prosecutors are being too soft on the officers, according to the New York Daily News.
(excerpt)
Lawyer Neville Mitchell's meeting with Queens prosecutor Charles Testagrossa came two days after Bell's family and fiancée met to discuss the highly charged case.
"I did meet with Mr. Testagrossa [Friday]," said Mitchell, who represents William and Valerie Bell. "We had a discussion about how I feel about what's going on.
"We're somewhat concerned about the prosecution. We don't want to denigrate the prosecution, but we want a little more passion. The family's looking for justice."
Another source in the Bell camp was more blunt.
"They're not prosecuting like they believe in the case," that source said. "Are they presenting a no-holds-barred case? You could make the argument that they're not."
Are they surprised? Federal, state and local prosecutors are loathe to handle cases where law enforcement officers are charged with criminal behavior especially involving officer-involved shootings. They depend on law enforcement agencies outside their office to do much of the work to build criminal cases after all.
The only case ever filed in Riverside County was not done through the District Attorney's office (which itself has never filed charges for an onduty shooting and likely never will) but through a criminal grand jury comprised of county residents in the case of former District Attorney's office investigator Daniel Riter who was ultimately tried and convicted of involuntary manslaughter. The county grand jury is an oft used process in New York City and as a result, more shooting incidents involving that city's officers are subjected to criminal charges and prosecution.
In New York City, the cases are then prosecuted by the relevant county prosecutory agency, whereas in the case of Riter, the State Attorney General's office took over because he worked for the county prosecutory agency and a conflict of interest was called by that agency.
In recent trial testimony involving the Sean Bell case, it was revealed that one of the crime scene detectives had violated the practices used to document evidence when she ripped open a compartment in Bell's car to see if there was a weapon inside. She appeared to be doing so from the mindset that her job was to try to find a way for the shooting to be exonerated which would have been more likely if the weapon that the police department searched the entire city including gutters for actually ever existed let alone was found. Her job was to use proper techniques authorized by her agency to find and process evidence appropriately without contaminating the crime scene. But did she view the shooting as a potential crime involving officers and thus the location of the shooting a potential crime scene?
Unfortunately, by her actions, the detective jeopardized the case, though it's unlikely the prosecutors really are going to lose much sleep over that. They probably lost more sleep worrying who would be saddled with such an unpopular prosecution.
A squad car being driven by a Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department deputy drifted over the center divider and struck three cyclists, killing two of them.
A man died in the custody of Los Angeles Police Department officers.
Also in Los Angeles, a turf war has broken out at City Hall over who would control the gang prevention programs, according to the Los Angeles Times.
(excerpt)
Each side blames the other for waging the kind of political infighting that for years has hamstrung the city's ability to combat some of the nation's worst youth violence.
Some leaders fear the impasse will only raise public doubt about City Hall's ability to rise above territorial squabbles and act responsibly.
"We have to get through the political battles for the good of the city," said Councilwoman Janice Hahn, who is promoting a $30-million parcel tax on the November city ballot to pay for new gang-prevention programs.
The current friction involves Councilman Tony Cardenas, who chairs a committee on gangs, and City Controller Laura Chick. Cardenas is fighting a plan by Chick to shift gang-prevention services, now under council control, to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's office.
What part of the words collaborative effort do these people not understand? They should be working together not against each other or competing with one another.
Riverside and San Bernardino Counties did not fare well when it came to receiving grant funding from the state. The Riverside City Council had approved matching funds for a $500,000 GRIP grant that would have benefited Project Bridge's expansion. The city found out that it won't receive a dime nor would any applicant for that grant money in Riverside County.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise
Police departments in Riverside and Murrieta each had asked for $500,000 in gang prevention grants. The city of Desert Hot Springs had asked for $227,000 and the Corona-Norco YMCA requested $50,000.
In addition, the Riverside County Economic Development Agency asked for $400,000 in job-training money.
The money Riverside hoped to receive would have totaled $1 million as a matching grant to expand police efforts with Project BRIDGE -- Building Resources for the Intervention and Deterrence of Gang Engagement. It is the city's only gang intervention program.
Officials hoped to expand the program into the city's west end around the Arlanza neighborhood, which has been hit by gang violence with four gang-related homicides in the past two years, according to police.
"I thought we had identified a good need," said Capt. John Carpenter.
Riverside's parks and recreation department oversees Project BRIDGE and hoped the money would fund four part-time outreach workers, said Patricia Callaghan, who oversees the program. The rest of the money would help pay for mileage and another van for outings. The additional employees would have allowed them to spend more time in the middle schools and with younger children, she said.
Matching funds already were in place for the requested state money.
"It wasn't something that was just starting up. It was something that was solid and going," Callaghan said. "We really thought we had a good chance."
They say there's no such thing as earthquake weather but the twin tremors were followed by a nice, warm and breezy day. Not unusual for March.
The Ville is open as of last month but for how long? City Attorney Gregory Priamos is trying to get the ABC to take a closer look at the night spot but the owner of the Ville said that a nearby Denny's restaurant is to blame for his bar's reputation.
Riverside's centralizing its homeless services into the Northside section of the city where there are already facilities including several shelters. It's good that the city's providing these valuable services for some of its most vulnerable residents and with the economy going south and the housing market going with it, there will probably be more of these residents. However, this area of the city has inherited this responsibility for the entire city simply because it's not "special" like the Wood Streets and the Inland Empire's "cultural jewel", the downtown.
So instead the city pushes the homeless (and that's an accurate word for it) into both or either the Northside and the Eastside. The Eastside's not been really allowed much of a voice in this process and many of those who advocate for homeless services from other neighborhoods are perfectly content to do so--as long as it's not in their neighborhoods. They don't have a voice in the way that those who are downtown and those living in the Wood Streets have a voice. After all, the Wood Streets neighborhood was able to complain loud enough about Black and Latino pedestrians walking down the streets to Kawa Market, to essentially motivate City Hall to level the landmark to the ground. With it, went a piece of Riverside's history and possibly a city councilman's career.
The city seems eager now to help relocate businesses which are located in the Northside near the homeless shelters in a way that it hasn't been towards those in the Eastside which is certainly interesting.
Hal Durian asks, who's a bum recollecting the story of one homeless man who lived in Riverside in the 1980s.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise)
Some persons reading this column might have been tempted to drop out and hit the road just as Dubois did. A large number of Americans are only one or two paychecks removed from homelessness. That number will increase if the economy moves into recession.
Therefore, perhaps a bit of sympathy should be given to those unfortunates some would call bums.
Back to our subject, Dubois. The man had a college degree and was obviously intelligent. Could a counselor have found a place for him in a job less stressful than his previous position as a high school teacher?
Perhaps, instead of sleeping on the roof of the museum, he could have been a useful employee inside the museum. Possibly, after his months on the road in all types of weather, he would have welcomed a steady job and a dry, clean place to sleep.
Dubois is long gone now, but one can't help wondering if more could not be done to assist today's homeless persons. There will always be those who prefer the rough life on the road, but some could be helped through counseling and job preparation to enter the more comfortable mainstream of society.
The Press Enterprise Editorial Board is chiding the parents of students at the soon-to-be-closed Grant Elementary School in Riverside.
(excerpt)
Riverside Unified is suffering the effects of the state's huge budget shortfall. Gov. Schwarzenegger wants to cut current K-12 education spending by $2.2 billion next fiscal year. School districts have to craft their budgets long in advance of the final state budget, and thus have to work from the governor's plans in making financial decisions.
So the Riverside district faces the need to trim $23.7 million from its current $370 million general fund budget. And that task invites a series of painful decisions, which could include layoffs, scrapping programs and closing schools. Shutting Grant Elementary would save the district $510,325 a year -- though the board has not yet decided whether to close the campus.
But hauling that decision into court would saddle the district with new legal expenses. Just how does adding to the district's large financial burden help Grant or any other school? Taking legal action would also inflame tempers and divide the district at a time when it most needs consensus on the right financial course.
Grant school's supporters have every right to argue for keeping the school open. But they should make that case before the school board and the public, and not to a judge.
The editorial board should focus its attention more on why the state has a governor who is intent on balancing the state's budget and its current deficit on the backs of the public school systems. This is something that the board would do if only the current governor was not a Republican. For all the gnashing of teeth about the Press Enterprise being a "liberal" paper or the "Moscow Times", in reality it's owned by conservatives from Texas who own many other such outlets. All you need to do is check its record of spanking elected Democrats compared to its record of spanking Republicans especially in situations when they both deserve it.
The Riverside City Council's finance committee is meeting on Monday, March 10, at 3:30 p.m. on the seventh floor on City Hall. It's chaired by Ward Five Councilman Chris MacArthur and includes Nancy Hart from the sixth ward and Mike Gardner from the first ward.
Here is the report on the adjustment of user fees. The estimated recovery revenue is set at about $600,000.
It's recommended that you access this report in its pdf format because the way it's been scanned for laserfische makes it extremely difficult to read. The proposed changes impact everything from permits to duplications of the recordings of city council meetings. And in many cases, fees are going up quite a bit for the services.
One very important detail in this newly proposed program is the provision that eliminates certain fees (which stands at $260 for initial studies, streamlined administrative processes and time extension determinations) involved for filing a planning appeal on the above listed issues but all these appeals must now be approved by the city council.
The fees that are increasing in various areas of city services won't impact wealthy development firms so much but likely will impact home owners and small business owners by making it more costly to do just about anything at City Hall. Why? Because even as the Riverside Renaissance express train rolls straight ahead (with the bonus that it might become more costly for city residents to file appeals on issues impacting them), the city is balancing its budget woes on the backs of the city's residents.
This makes one wonder if the city tried to balance its budget woes on the backs of city employees by making it so fewer of them put in more hours and labor for providing basic services on everything from parks, to development to public safety and now is moving onto the residents.
At any rate, Budget 2008 is just getting started with much more to come in the upcoming months. Let the games begin.
Police officers in Rockville, Maryland are refusing to pay their speeding tickets. About two-thirds of the officers who were flagged by the cameras set up to catch speeders who weren't responding to a call for service have vetoed paying their fines.
Who should pay up for the fines is a point of dispute among different parties.
(excerpt, Associated Press)
The police union says officers shouldn't pay because the citations are issued to the owner of a vehicle, in this case the county, and not to the driver.
Police Chief Thomas Manger doesn't buy that argument.
"We are not above the law," Manger said. "It is imperative that the police department hold itself to the same standards that we're holding the public to."
Manger said officers who continue to ignore citations might be disciplined.
Here's an interesting question for an officer in Maryland. When you pull someone over for speeding, do you cite the person that is speeding or if it's a family member who's borrowing the family car and is speeding, do you instead write the citation to the owner of the car?
That's the problem with the red-light camera program in most cities is that someone might get a citation in the mail that they ran a stop light for example and it was actually their wife or daughter or son or husband who was driving the vehicle at the time.
But if the county does have to pay up on the citations, then it's clear who the buck will be passed to and that's the county's residents who already have to pay their own citations or follow the traffic laws to avoid paying for citations.
Sean Bell's family members think that Queens County prosecutors are being too soft on the officers, according to the New York Daily News.
(excerpt)
Lawyer Neville Mitchell's meeting with Queens prosecutor Charles Testagrossa came two days after Bell's family and fiancée met to discuss the highly charged case.
"I did meet with Mr. Testagrossa [Friday]," said Mitchell, who represents William and Valerie Bell. "We had a discussion about how I feel about what's going on.
"We're somewhat concerned about the prosecution. We don't want to denigrate the prosecution, but we want a little more passion. The family's looking for justice."
Another source in the Bell camp was more blunt.
"They're not prosecuting like they believe in the case," that source said. "Are they presenting a no-holds-barred case? You could make the argument that they're not."
Are they surprised? Federal, state and local prosecutors are loathe to handle cases where law enforcement officers are charged with criminal behavior especially involving officer-involved shootings. They depend on law enforcement agencies outside their office to do much of the work to build criminal cases after all.
The only case ever filed in Riverside County was not done through the District Attorney's office (which itself has never filed charges for an onduty shooting and likely never will) but through a criminal grand jury comprised of county residents in the case of former District Attorney's office investigator Daniel Riter who was ultimately tried and convicted of involuntary manslaughter. The county grand jury is an oft used process in New York City and as a result, more shooting incidents involving that city's officers are subjected to criminal charges and prosecution.
In New York City, the cases are then prosecuted by the relevant county prosecutory agency, whereas in the case of Riter, the State Attorney General's office took over because he worked for the county prosecutory agency and a conflict of interest was called by that agency.
In recent trial testimony involving the Sean Bell case, it was revealed that one of the crime scene detectives had violated the practices used to document evidence when she ripped open a compartment in Bell's car to see if there was a weapon inside. She appeared to be doing so from the mindset that her job was to try to find a way for the shooting to be exonerated which would have been more likely if the weapon that the police department searched the entire city including gutters for actually ever existed let alone was found. Her job was to use proper techniques authorized by her agency to find and process evidence appropriately without contaminating the crime scene. But did she view the shooting as a potential crime involving officers and thus the location of the shooting a potential crime scene?
Unfortunately, by her actions, the detective jeopardized the case, though it's unlikely the prosecutors really are going to lose much sleep over that. They probably lost more sleep worrying who would be saddled with such an unpopular prosecution.
A squad car being driven by a Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department deputy drifted over the center divider and struck three cyclists, killing two of them.
A man died in the custody of Los Angeles Police Department officers.
Also in Los Angeles, a turf war has broken out at City Hall over who would control the gang prevention programs, according to the Los Angeles Times.
(excerpt)
Each side blames the other for waging the kind of political infighting that for years has hamstrung the city's ability to combat some of the nation's worst youth violence.
Some leaders fear the impasse will only raise public doubt about City Hall's ability to rise above territorial squabbles and act responsibly.
"We have to get through the political battles for the good of the city," said Councilwoman Janice Hahn, who is promoting a $30-million parcel tax on the November city ballot to pay for new gang-prevention programs.
The current friction involves Councilman Tony Cardenas, who chairs a committee on gangs, and City Controller Laura Chick. Cardenas is fighting a plan by Chick to shift gang-prevention services, now under council control, to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's office.
What part of the words collaborative effort do these people not understand? They should be working together not against each other or competing with one another.
Riverside and San Bernardino Counties did not fare well when it came to receiving grant funding from the state. The Riverside City Council had approved matching funds for a $500,000 GRIP grant that would have benefited Project Bridge's expansion. The city found out that it won't receive a dime nor would any applicant for that grant money in Riverside County.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise
Police departments in Riverside and Murrieta each had asked for $500,000 in gang prevention grants. The city of Desert Hot Springs had asked for $227,000 and the Corona-Norco YMCA requested $50,000.
In addition, the Riverside County Economic Development Agency asked for $400,000 in job-training money.
The money Riverside hoped to receive would have totaled $1 million as a matching grant to expand police efforts with Project BRIDGE -- Building Resources for the Intervention and Deterrence of Gang Engagement. It is the city's only gang intervention program.
Officials hoped to expand the program into the city's west end around the Arlanza neighborhood, which has been hit by gang violence with four gang-related homicides in the past two years, according to police.
"I thought we had identified a good need," said Capt. John Carpenter.
Riverside's parks and recreation department oversees Project BRIDGE and hoped the money would fund four part-time outreach workers, said Patricia Callaghan, who oversees the program. The rest of the money would help pay for mileage and another van for outings. The additional employees would have allowed them to spend more time in the middle schools and with younger children, she said.
Matching funds already were in place for the requested state money.
"It wasn't something that was just starting up. It was something that was solid and going," Callaghan said. "We really thought we had a good chance."
Labels: officer-involved shootings, public forums in all places
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