CL’s County Supervisor comments on Purple Tier

By Kevin Jeffries
Riverside County Supervisor,
First District

Kevin Jeffries

Just when we thought Riverside County had finally reached the goal post to drop down and stay in the Red Tier, the testing and infection numbers went the wrong way, causing the state to put us back into the Purple penalty box.

Compared to our neighbors, we are right about in the middle, doing better than San Bernardino and Imperial Counties, a little better than LA County (who never made it into Red Tier), and worse than San Diego and Orange Counties. Since LA has been more aggressive than we have in enforcement, and OC has been more hands-off, it is easy to speculate that like everything else, demographics (poverty, age, ethnic disparities) have a lot to do with who is successful (or not) fighting COVID.

Shortly after the state announced our rollback and shutdowns, they also announced that they would be providing counties like ours with education and enforcement resources from the California Office of Emergency Services, Consumer Services, Labor Agency, Food & Agriculture Department, plus 30 agents from ABC sweeping across the county last week.

Based on the future testing and evaluation time frames set by the state, my unscientific guesstimate is that we could remain in Purple roughly up through Thanksgiving.

The good news is that overall California is doing much better than most states in keeping the virus and death numbers low. The bad news, our unemployment numbers and economic impacts are off the charts.

Telecommuting Study

The concept of having some employees work from home is nothing new to the private sector, but not so common in the government sector, at least until COVID arrived from China. Riverside County jumped on the bandwagon with roughly 7,000 of its 20,000 employees utilizing some form of telecommuting this year.

Telecommuting can help with reducing the need for office space, desks, phones, computers, and employee parking spaces and it can also help (a little) with traffic congestion. One of the notable downsides can be customer contact or public access.

The inability of members of the public to directly speak with a human resulted in our office receiving a barrage of complaints over citizens being unable to talk to someone either at the counter or on the phone when attempting to contact some county departments.

In fact, there were times that my staff could not even reach someone to pass along the complaints from the public. For the most part those stumbles (embarrassments) have been cleared up, and several agencies are reporting that their employees are more productive than ever before working remotely, without the distractions of the office environment.

Now we are dealing with the ongoing sticky issues of making sure work is actually being performed at home, which employees could or should utilize telecommuting, what if they want to work out-of-state, and how will employee evaluations be done? Answering those questions will determine whether this newfound support for telecommuting will continue post-COVID.