Just another Monday morning before an election day
****Election Update*****
Riverside County District One Supervisor ----11:01 p.m.
66.51% of the vote counted
Bob Buster: 10,889 61.27%
Frank Schiavone: 6,882 38.73%
Proposition 98
Yes: 41.2%
No: 58.8%
11:26 PM 52.2% of precincts Source: AP
Proposition 99
Yes: 63.7%
No: 36.3%
11:26 PM 52.2% of precincts Source: AP
Former Los Angeles Police Department Chief Bernard Parks losing to former theology teacher, Mark Ridley-Thomas for the open supervisor seat in Los Angeles County.
"Some fine day
You will find your way
Across the river
Row down slow
There's a long way to go
Across the river"
---Bruce Hornsby, "Across the River"
The Press Enterprise Editorial Board is refreshing the public's memory about its endorsements for the election that's taking place on June 3 at a polling site near you.
(excerpt)
Riverside County supervisor, 1st District: Bob Buster has earned another term. He has been a strong advocate of the county's habitat conservation plan, and helped craft the county's transportation fee to ensure that developers contribute to road improvements.
Buster also spearheaded a review of county fire safety policies after the 2006 Esperanza fire, and advocates such steps as restricting development in fire hazard areas. And he has a solid record of serving his district; examples include helping curb illegal dumping and reopening closed parks.
Riverside County supervisor, 3rd District: Incumbent Jeff Stone is the clear choice. Stone drove the creation of an ordinance to protect the Temecula wine country from overdevelopment, and led the fight to keep state firefighting aircraft at Hemet-Ryan Airport.
But Stone also has a tendency to grandstand in ways that undercut his credibility and effectiveness. He needs to restrain that impulse and focus on crafting good county policy.
If you haven't voted by mail, the polls will be open on June 3, so cast your votes.
Another mailer came in from the campaign of incumbent District One Supervisor Bob Buster, this time talking about traffic. The headline made me wonder.
"Elected officials like to talk about traffic congestion...but only one of them is a recognized leader in doing something about it: Bob Buster."
Not the second part of the sentence after the ellipse, but the part about liking to talk about it. Most of the time that's indeed the case but not during this past election cycle. Currently, traffic is a much more discussed topic among residents of a city or county, certainly in the Inland Empire and Southern California in general. However, it's not been a much discussed topic in this particular political campaign. The two topics discussed most by politicians at least through mailers and audio taped messages is undocumented immigration and needle exchange programs. Two issues of which there is little history of discussion of any specific agenda items or even general discussion addressing either of them. Two issues which are not only not discussed, but are only used to bash each other's campaigns.
And why so much attention given to mailers and audio messages? Because for the majority of the voters who can't attend the few forums and including those who don't have internet access, this is often the primary information they receive on a candidate especially those running who have never represented them in a political position, which most often is the challenger.
The sole purpose of dragging what outside an election year is called a federal issue into a local election is as stated to beat each other the head in the form of political attacks. This battle of words and later photographs between the two candidates was so fierce that eventually there was boasting about deferring emergency medical care away from the children of undocumented parents which by the way may be illegal certainly for the children impacted who are in fact under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, citizens. And to use photographs of unidentified darker-skinned individuals to associate with language used to bash an opponent, associating all undocumented immigrants with Mexico. This campaign sunk much further than I thought it would or could go.
First, let's take a look at another side of some of these issues.
If hospitals are overwhelmed, it is in large part in Riverside because people who are poor, immigrants, both legal and undocumented and individuals including senior citizens without doctors are forced to use emergency rooms to receive medical care. And with more and more trauma centers in hospitals closing, this problem has worsened. It's a crisis for the growing senior population as the "baby boomers" age and the funds from the "baby bust" generation don't match the demand. This phenomenon is contributing to the problems faced by medical care systems around the world.
In Riverside and likely other places, it's also complicated by the dearth of urgent care clinics that are opened during the night and early morning hours. Has the Riverside City Council which Schiavone is a member of discussed this issue in any length even though it's a crisis in its jurisdiction? One woman has regularly addressed the city council on this growing crisis and in response has received irritated glances and in some cases, derisive behavior.
Even when problems have emerged at local hospitals in Riverside and Riverside County in the past several years, that impact the quality of health care. Higher insurance premiums for doctors. Problems with health insurance companies and the medical profession. Shortages of doctors and other medical personnel remaining or choosing general medicine and obstetrics rather than opting for the higher earnings promised by pursuing medical specialities.
Schiavone states in his mailer that children can expect longer lines and more waiting, of which children, senior citizens and families already have been seeing and have always been seeing at least those who rely on hospitals for basic medical care. As long as there's a medical system that exists which pushes people who can't afford to see a regular doctor into the hospitals' trauma centers, that will always be the case. For many people in this country, the health care system as it is is broken and it's been an issue that has been fairly prominent in the national campaigns of presidential candidates even though its impact is felt primarily locally. Longer lines and waiting to see doctors is part of that problem in many cities and counties across the country.
Members of the public have brought up the urgent need for these clinics for many people in Riverside, yet these same people are the ones that certain elected officials on the dais boast to anyone who will listen to them that they are essentially running off.
Schiavone's ignorance over the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program is apparent in statements he makes on his mailer about Buser providing tax dollars for food stamps on undocumented immigrants. The vast majority of those who use WIC are citizens of this country and in fact, even members of the military depend on this and other social services. Anyone with a military background particularly in the U.S. Marines should be familiar with how strapped many of these families are and how they are often dependent on welfare programs including WIC. So when politicians like Schiavone make ignorant comments about a social program to attack their opponent, they can never be quite sure who it is that they are attacking.
(excerpt, Alternet)
Military families on food stamps? It's not an urban myth. About 25,000 families of servicemen and women are eligible, and this may be an underestimate, since the most recent Defense Department report on the financial condition of the armed forces -- from 1999 -- found that 40 percent of lower-ranking soldiers face "substantial financial difficulties." Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, reports hearing from constituents that the Army now includes applications for food stamps in its orientation packet for new recruits.
The poverty of the mightiest military machine on Earth is no secret to the many charities that have sprung up to help families on U.S. military bases, like the church-based Feed the Children, which delivers free food and personal items to families at twelve bases. Before 9/11, trucks bearing free food from a variety of food pantries used to be able to drive right on to the bases. Now they have to stop outside the gates, making the spectacle of military poverty visible to any passerby.
Market forces ensure that a volunteer army will necessarily be an army of the poor. The trouble is, enlistment does not do a whole lot to brighten one's economic outlook. Frontline battle troops, most of whom have been in the military for about a year, earn less than $16,000 a year -- which puts them at about the level of theater ushers and Wal-Mart clerks. Even second lieutenants, at a starting salary of $26,000 a year, earn less than pest control workers and shoe repairers. So when the Bush Administration, in its frenzied rush to transfer more wealth to the already wealthy, hurts the working poor, you can count the troops among them. The 2003 Bush tax cut for the rich, for example, failed to extend a child tax credit to nearly 200,000 military personnel.
So if Schiavone's going to attack Buster for funding WIC because it's also providing services to relatively few undocumented immigrants (as most don't want the exposure such a program would require), then he is also attacking the same program which offers the assistance to many military personnel that Uncle Sam let alone the current president in office won't provide them even as thousands of them including residents of Riverside County have been killed in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and that's when they aren't cutting their bonuses or cutting their veteran benefits.
It's a bit disheartening to learn that a candidate for a county seat doesn't know much about county services for women and children that he makes such statements which just shows that. Hopefully, if he gets elected, he'll get a cram course in Riverside County 101 before he attends his first meeting.
What's also interesting about Schiavone's condemnation of an entire program because it advertises to undocumented immigrants, is that when it comes to other entities that advertise to undocumented immigrants including those in labor including the home building and construction industry, Schiavone has much less to say and certainly much less time to do a blanket condemnation of the industry which he works in. That's the irony about both candidates as that they both work in industries where there's a high percentage of employment of undocumented immigrants yet they focus their attention on county services.
As for the amount of money spent on corporate welfare? No discussion on that but then there never is. Just pinpointing attacks on women and children and perhaps inadvertently, military personnel who rely on social services to provide for their families what they can't afford. Nothing about the benefits that private development firms including the keys to your business which in Riverside, Schiavone and others on the Riverside city council have taken it upon themselves to take from business owners through eminent domain or threats of eminent domain. And given that proposition 99 may likely defeat 98 (and neither of these propositions are anything but wolves in sheep's' clothing), that could be bad news for county residents who own small businesses that don't fit with the latest vision that the leadership that favors out-of-county development firms over business owners.
Who knows, maybe the entire county will become one huge redevelopment zone. As you know, property tax increments that could be spent on beefing up or even maintaining basic services will instead go back to paying off part of (but never completely because by definition, redevelopment agencies have to be in the red) redevelopment loan debts. If there's money that's needed there, perhaps there's a sewer fund to borrow from or two. One of the most commonly told jokes in Riverside, is if there is any money in the sewer fund today, given that this fund has been borrowed from by the city to use to buy such nonsewer-related expenses as small businesses lining Market Street.
Riverside Ward Four Councilman Frank Schiavone's mailer where he used photographs of individuals and placed them next to language about Buster giving millions of dollars in benefits to undocumented immigrants, is probably the worst political mailer in the entire campaign or any campaign in recent memory. The use of the photographs are problematic for his campaign if they were taken without the knowledge of those individuals, particularly those brown-skinned individuals in the top photographs, which rests on top of a thinly outlined map of Mexico and the "fence". Because of course, all undocumented immigrants come from Mexico. No, they don't, but what Schiavone and others who would portray it that way just to win votes because there's certainly been a dearth of issues discussed through mailers and audio recorded messages. Because substituting a picture of the globe, instead of a map of Mexico would have been truthful, but then election campaigns are seldom about truth and more about inflaming the voters against a candidate rather than in support of one.
The audio phone messages and radio advertisements by Mayor Ron Loveridge (a Democrat) urging the voters to join all Democrats (even as Democrats Nancy Hart and Andrew Melendrez not to mention former city councilman Dom Betro from the city council endorsed the Democratic candidate, Buster) to vote for a Republican and Riverside Police Chief Russ Leach (as an individual member of the state's association of police chiefs) urging people to join in with his labor union, the sheriffs and the fire fighters to vote for Schiavone were more significant in what they revealed about the tightly woven political structure that is Riverside rather than in stumping for their candidate. How much separation exists between city council and city departments, politically speaking? And how much weight does an endorsement carry if it's for your bosses boss?
No doubt there are two Riverside Police Department lieutenants and their attorneys who are paying close attention to what's playing out as the political and management leaders of their department vote for a man who they alleged warned another officer not to associate with them, lest his promotional opportunities be dimmed.
But what's in the more positive columns?
Buster's record with the Transportation Uniform Mitigation Fee, which is nationally renowned, and require that development firms pay a portion of the funding for traffic modifications in the areas where they are building, is very important and impressive. It would have been nice if there'd been more discussions around this issue in the war of paper because programs that help reduce traffic condition are very much in need in most areas of Riverside County. These things need attention in campaigns as well as programs to address the amount and pace of development including where it's concentrated, preservation of parks and habitats, addressing the housing crises and its impact on funding sources, insuring equal allocation of public safety resources between contact cities and unincorporated areas of the county and of course, traffic, traffic and traffic.
Before I stopped receiving Schiavone's campaign mailers, I had already noticed that there's scant information about his accomplishments and for all his complaints of mudslinging, that last mailer he sent out was so over the top (and the blanket support of tactics like that by his endorsers who are encharged with providing public services was very disturbing) that obviously he's only concerned about mudslinging that impacts his campaign. At least with Buster's mailers, interspersed with the negative (and his boast of deferring children of undocumented immigrants away from emergency medical care just comes off as being against children and may not be legal), there are listings of the positives of living in Riverside County. If he has any problems keeping his seat, this is where they lie, in the negative portions of his campaign.
Although I believe that Buster's is more qualified for the job precisely because of a myriad of reasons not to mention that electing a candidate who's not good at serving out a commitment of service is always a risky proposition as is electing an individual who can barely sit through city council meetings that are less than two hours in length per session let alone all-day county meetings. Being a county elected official also requires being patient and accommodating even to views that the elected official disagrees with, rather than acting out on the dais. If you can't stand the stressful nature of a city council meeting, then you probably shouldn't even attend a county one let alone sit on the dais. Political meetings only become more of pressure cookers with each step up the food chain of the political structure and it's not clear that Schiavone's up to that challenge given his behavior on the dais including as mayor pro tem at meetings in the past year.
However, the campaigns launched by both camps have made it difficult to celebrate this election. They could have been opportunities for each candidate to show why they were the best, but for the most part, what the mailers and audio messages showed is what they don't like about each other.
People have been asking if the elected officials sitting on Riverside's dais who pushed the resolution against DHL had any idea that the company was in such dire straits in regards to its domestic operations that it was considering cutting loose from March Air Field. Then they could impress the voters in Elections 2008 and 2009 respectively that they had actually solved the problem one week before the county supervisor elections.
The only thing I can say, is ask your elected official that question.
The vacancy rate at the Riverside Police Department differs depending on who you ask, though the responses are that it's at zero or a very low rate. It's also not clear how many police officer positions have been frozen in the wake of budget cuts.
More earthquakes have struck the inland area, but they've been fairly tiny and hitting areas of San Bernardino County. It's not the sound of Needles wanting to secede from California.
Hexavalent Chromium reared its ugly head again as the known carcinogen was found being released from a cement factory near Riverside. There has been public meetings held in Colton and Rubidoux regarding the exposure of residents to this toxic chemical.
In New York City, a rally was held to protest the acquittals of three detectives of criminal charges in connection with the 2006 fatal shooting of Sean Bell.
Former Bolingbrook Police Department sergeant, Drew Peterson through his attorney is trying to get his weapons charge dismissed.
(excerpt, Chicago Tribune)
Friday marked Peterson's first court appearance since his arrest last week. Authorities said the charge stemmed from Peterson's ownership of an assault rifle with a barrel nearly five inches shorter than allowed by law.
Peterson and his attorneys, Joel Brodsky and Andrew Abood, claim the gun was registered with the Bolingbrook police for Peterson's use as a member of the department's SWAT team. But the Will County State's attorney's office contends the gun was privately owned by Peterson, and Bolingbrook police officials have said the department had no knowledge of the weapon.
Riverside County District One Supervisor ----11:01 p.m.
66.51% of the vote counted
Bob Buster: 10,889 61.27%
Frank Schiavone: 6,882 38.73%
Proposition 98
Yes: 41.2%
No: 58.8%
11:26 PM 52.2% of precincts Source: AP
Proposition 99
Yes: 63.7%
No: 36.3%
11:26 PM 52.2% of precincts Source: AP
Former Los Angeles Police Department Chief Bernard Parks losing to former theology teacher, Mark Ridley-Thomas for the open supervisor seat in Los Angeles County.
"Some fine day
You will find your way
Across the river
Row down slow
There's a long way to go
Across the river"
---Bruce Hornsby, "Across the River"
The Press Enterprise Editorial Board is refreshing the public's memory about its endorsements for the election that's taking place on June 3 at a polling site near you.
(excerpt)
Riverside County supervisor, 1st District: Bob Buster has earned another term. He has been a strong advocate of the county's habitat conservation plan, and helped craft the county's transportation fee to ensure that developers contribute to road improvements.
Buster also spearheaded a review of county fire safety policies after the 2006 Esperanza fire, and advocates such steps as restricting development in fire hazard areas. And he has a solid record of serving his district; examples include helping curb illegal dumping and reopening closed parks.
Riverside County supervisor, 3rd District: Incumbent Jeff Stone is the clear choice. Stone drove the creation of an ordinance to protect the Temecula wine country from overdevelopment, and led the fight to keep state firefighting aircraft at Hemet-Ryan Airport.
But Stone also has a tendency to grandstand in ways that undercut his credibility and effectiveness. He needs to restrain that impulse and focus on crafting good county policy.
If you haven't voted by mail, the polls will be open on June 3, so cast your votes.
Another mailer came in from the campaign of incumbent District One Supervisor Bob Buster, this time talking about traffic. The headline made me wonder.
"Elected officials like to talk about traffic congestion...but only one of them is a recognized leader in doing something about it: Bob Buster."
Not the second part of the sentence after the ellipse, but the part about liking to talk about it. Most of the time that's indeed the case but not during this past election cycle. Currently, traffic is a much more discussed topic among residents of a city or county, certainly in the Inland Empire and Southern California in general. However, it's not been a much discussed topic in this particular political campaign. The two topics discussed most by politicians at least through mailers and audio taped messages is undocumented immigration and needle exchange programs. Two issues of which there is little history of discussion of any specific agenda items or even general discussion addressing either of them. Two issues which are not only not discussed, but are only used to bash each other's campaigns.
And why so much attention given to mailers and audio messages? Because for the majority of the voters who can't attend the few forums and including those who don't have internet access, this is often the primary information they receive on a candidate especially those running who have never represented them in a political position, which most often is the challenger.
The sole purpose of dragging what outside an election year is called a federal issue into a local election is as stated to beat each other the head in the form of political attacks. This battle of words and later photographs between the two candidates was so fierce that eventually there was boasting about deferring emergency medical care away from the children of undocumented parents which by the way may be illegal certainly for the children impacted who are in fact under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, citizens. And to use photographs of unidentified darker-skinned individuals to associate with language used to bash an opponent, associating all undocumented immigrants with Mexico. This campaign sunk much further than I thought it would or could go.
First, let's take a look at another side of some of these issues.
If hospitals are overwhelmed, it is in large part in Riverside because people who are poor, immigrants, both legal and undocumented and individuals including senior citizens without doctors are forced to use emergency rooms to receive medical care. And with more and more trauma centers in hospitals closing, this problem has worsened. It's a crisis for the growing senior population as the "baby boomers" age and the funds from the "baby bust" generation don't match the demand. This phenomenon is contributing to the problems faced by medical care systems around the world.
In Riverside and likely other places, it's also complicated by the dearth of urgent care clinics that are opened during the night and early morning hours. Has the Riverside City Council which Schiavone is a member of discussed this issue in any length even though it's a crisis in its jurisdiction? One woman has regularly addressed the city council on this growing crisis and in response has received irritated glances and in some cases, derisive behavior.
Even when problems have emerged at local hospitals in Riverside and Riverside County in the past several years, that impact the quality of health care. Higher insurance premiums for doctors. Problems with health insurance companies and the medical profession. Shortages of doctors and other medical personnel remaining or choosing general medicine and obstetrics rather than opting for the higher earnings promised by pursuing medical specialities.
Schiavone states in his mailer that children can expect longer lines and more waiting, of which children, senior citizens and families already have been seeing and have always been seeing at least those who rely on hospitals for basic medical care. As long as there's a medical system that exists which pushes people who can't afford to see a regular doctor into the hospitals' trauma centers, that will always be the case. For many people in this country, the health care system as it is is broken and it's been an issue that has been fairly prominent in the national campaigns of presidential candidates even though its impact is felt primarily locally. Longer lines and waiting to see doctors is part of that problem in many cities and counties across the country.
Members of the public have brought up the urgent need for these clinics for many people in Riverside, yet these same people are the ones that certain elected officials on the dais boast to anyone who will listen to them that they are essentially running off.
Schiavone's ignorance over the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program is apparent in statements he makes on his mailer about Buser providing tax dollars for food stamps on undocumented immigrants. The vast majority of those who use WIC are citizens of this country and in fact, even members of the military depend on this and other social services. Anyone with a military background particularly in the U.S. Marines should be familiar with how strapped many of these families are and how they are often dependent on welfare programs including WIC. So when politicians like Schiavone make ignorant comments about a social program to attack their opponent, they can never be quite sure who it is that they are attacking.
(excerpt, Alternet)
Military families on food stamps? It's not an urban myth. About 25,000 families of servicemen and women are eligible, and this may be an underestimate, since the most recent Defense Department report on the financial condition of the armed forces -- from 1999 -- found that 40 percent of lower-ranking soldiers face "substantial financial difficulties." Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, reports hearing from constituents that the Army now includes applications for food stamps in its orientation packet for new recruits.
The poverty of the mightiest military machine on Earth is no secret to the many charities that have sprung up to help families on U.S. military bases, like the church-based Feed the Children, which delivers free food and personal items to families at twelve bases. Before 9/11, trucks bearing free food from a variety of food pantries used to be able to drive right on to the bases. Now they have to stop outside the gates, making the spectacle of military poverty visible to any passerby.
Market forces ensure that a volunteer army will necessarily be an army of the poor. The trouble is, enlistment does not do a whole lot to brighten one's economic outlook. Frontline battle troops, most of whom have been in the military for about a year, earn less than $16,000 a year -- which puts them at about the level of theater ushers and Wal-Mart clerks. Even second lieutenants, at a starting salary of $26,000 a year, earn less than pest control workers and shoe repairers. So when the Bush Administration, in its frenzied rush to transfer more wealth to the already wealthy, hurts the working poor, you can count the troops among them. The 2003 Bush tax cut for the rich, for example, failed to extend a child tax credit to nearly 200,000 military personnel.
So if Schiavone's going to attack Buster for funding WIC because it's also providing services to relatively few undocumented immigrants (as most don't want the exposure such a program would require), then he is also attacking the same program which offers the assistance to many military personnel that Uncle Sam let alone the current president in office won't provide them even as thousands of them including residents of Riverside County have been killed in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and that's when they aren't cutting their bonuses or cutting their veteran benefits.
It's a bit disheartening to learn that a candidate for a county seat doesn't know much about county services for women and children that he makes such statements which just shows that. Hopefully, if he gets elected, he'll get a cram course in Riverside County 101 before he attends his first meeting.
What's also interesting about Schiavone's condemnation of an entire program because it advertises to undocumented immigrants, is that when it comes to other entities that advertise to undocumented immigrants including those in labor including the home building and construction industry, Schiavone has much less to say and certainly much less time to do a blanket condemnation of the industry which he works in. That's the irony about both candidates as that they both work in industries where there's a high percentage of employment of undocumented immigrants yet they focus their attention on county services.
As for the amount of money spent on corporate welfare? No discussion on that but then there never is. Just pinpointing attacks on women and children and perhaps inadvertently, military personnel who rely on social services to provide for their families what they can't afford. Nothing about the benefits that private development firms including the keys to your business which in Riverside, Schiavone and others on the Riverside city council have taken it upon themselves to take from business owners through eminent domain or threats of eminent domain. And given that proposition 99 may likely defeat 98 (and neither of these propositions are anything but wolves in sheep's' clothing), that could be bad news for county residents who own small businesses that don't fit with the latest vision that the leadership that favors out-of-county development firms over business owners.
Who knows, maybe the entire county will become one huge redevelopment zone. As you know, property tax increments that could be spent on beefing up or even maintaining basic services will instead go back to paying off part of (but never completely because by definition, redevelopment agencies have to be in the red) redevelopment loan debts. If there's money that's needed there, perhaps there's a sewer fund to borrow from or two. One of the most commonly told jokes in Riverside, is if there is any money in the sewer fund today, given that this fund has been borrowed from by the city to use to buy such nonsewer-related expenses as small businesses lining Market Street.
Riverside Ward Four Councilman Frank Schiavone's mailer where he used photographs of individuals and placed them next to language about Buster giving millions of dollars in benefits to undocumented immigrants, is probably the worst political mailer in the entire campaign or any campaign in recent memory. The use of the photographs are problematic for his campaign if they were taken without the knowledge of those individuals, particularly those brown-skinned individuals in the top photographs, which rests on top of a thinly outlined map of Mexico and the "fence". Because of course, all undocumented immigrants come from Mexico. No, they don't, but what Schiavone and others who would portray it that way just to win votes because there's certainly been a dearth of issues discussed through mailers and audio recorded messages. Because substituting a picture of the globe, instead of a map of Mexico would have been truthful, but then election campaigns are seldom about truth and more about inflaming the voters against a candidate rather than in support of one.
The audio phone messages and radio advertisements by Mayor Ron Loveridge (a Democrat) urging the voters to join all Democrats (even as Democrats Nancy Hart and Andrew Melendrez not to mention former city councilman Dom Betro from the city council endorsed the Democratic candidate, Buster) to vote for a Republican and Riverside Police Chief Russ Leach (as an individual member of the state's association of police chiefs) urging people to join in with his labor union, the sheriffs and the fire fighters to vote for Schiavone were more significant in what they revealed about the tightly woven political structure that is Riverside rather than in stumping for their candidate. How much separation exists between city council and city departments, politically speaking? And how much weight does an endorsement carry if it's for your bosses boss?
No doubt there are two Riverside Police Department lieutenants and their attorneys who are paying close attention to what's playing out as the political and management leaders of their department vote for a man who they alleged warned another officer not to associate with them, lest his promotional opportunities be dimmed.
But what's in the more positive columns?
Buster's record with the Transportation Uniform Mitigation Fee, which is nationally renowned, and require that development firms pay a portion of the funding for traffic modifications in the areas where they are building, is very important and impressive. It would have been nice if there'd been more discussions around this issue in the war of paper because programs that help reduce traffic condition are very much in need in most areas of Riverside County. These things need attention in campaigns as well as programs to address the amount and pace of development including where it's concentrated, preservation of parks and habitats, addressing the housing crises and its impact on funding sources, insuring equal allocation of public safety resources between contact cities and unincorporated areas of the county and of course, traffic, traffic and traffic.
Before I stopped receiving Schiavone's campaign mailers, I had already noticed that there's scant information about his accomplishments and for all his complaints of mudslinging, that last mailer he sent out was so over the top (and the blanket support of tactics like that by his endorsers who are encharged with providing public services was very disturbing) that obviously he's only concerned about mudslinging that impacts his campaign. At least with Buster's mailers, interspersed with the negative (and his boast of deferring children of undocumented immigrants away from emergency medical care just comes off as being against children and may not be legal), there are listings of the positives of living in Riverside County. If he has any problems keeping his seat, this is where they lie, in the negative portions of his campaign.
Although I believe that Buster's is more qualified for the job precisely because of a myriad of reasons not to mention that electing a candidate who's not good at serving out a commitment of service is always a risky proposition as is electing an individual who can barely sit through city council meetings that are less than two hours in length per session let alone all-day county meetings. Being a county elected official also requires being patient and accommodating even to views that the elected official disagrees with, rather than acting out on the dais. If you can't stand the stressful nature of a city council meeting, then you probably shouldn't even attend a county one let alone sit on the dais. Political meetings only become more of pressure cookers with each step up the food chain of the political structure and it's not clear that Schiavone's up to that challenge given his behavior on the dais including as mayor pro tem at meetings in the past year.
However, the campaigns launched by both camps have made it difficult to celebrate this election. They could have been opportunities for each candidate to show why they were the best, but for the most part, what the mailers and audio messages showed is what they don't like about each other.
People have been asking if the elected officials sitting on Riverside's dais who pushed the resolution against DHL had any idea that the company was in such dire straits in regards to its domestic operations that it was considering cutting loose from March Air Field. Then they could impress the voters in Elections 2008 and 2009 respectively that they had actually solved the problem one week before the county supervisor elections.
The only thing I can say, is ask your elected official that question.
The vacancy rate at the Riverside Police Department differs depending on who you ask, though the responses are that it's at zero or a very low rate. It's also not clear how many police officer positions have been frozen in the wake of budget cuts.
More earthquakes have struck the inland area, but they've been fairly tiny and hitting areas of San Bernardino County. It's not the sound of Needles wanting to secede from California.
Hexavalent Chromium reared its ugly head again as the known carcinogen was found being released from a cement factory near Riverside. There has been public meetings held in Colton and Rubidoux regarding the exposure of residents to this toxic chemical.
In New York City, a rally was held to protest the acquittals of three detectives of criminal charges in connection with the 2006 fatal shooting of Sean Bell.
Former Bolingbrook Police Department sergeant, Drew Peterson through his attorney is trying to get his weapons charge dismissed.
(excerpt, Chicago Tribune)
Friday marked Peterson's first court appearance since his arrest last week. Authorities said the charge stemmed from Peterson's ownership of an assault rifle with a barrel nearly five inches shorter than allowed by law.
Peterson and his attorneys, Joel Brodsky and Andrew Abood, claim the gun was registered with the Bolingbrook police for Peterson's use as a member of the department's SWAT team. But the Will County State's attorney's office contends the gun was privately owned by Peterson, and Bolingbrook police officials have said the department had no knowledge of the weapon.
Labels: election 2008public forums in all places, officer-involved shootings
posted by Five Before Midnight | 10:54 PM
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