Riverside County hires new CEO

By Kevin Jeffries
1st District County Supervisor

After conducting an extensive search, my fellow Board members and I agreed 5-0 to hire Jeff Van Wagenen to replace retired County CEO George Johnson.

KEVIN JEFFRIES – 1st District County Supervisor

The County has roughly 20,000 employees, 44 or so departments, is the 10th largest (population) in the nation, 4th largest in the state of California, and manages roughly $6 billion in taxpayer dollars (most of it pre-programmed by the State and Feds, and/or shipped off to public schools on behalf of the State).

Jeff has a daunting task ahead of him in looking for opportunities to reorganize, reshape, drive efficiencies, deal with dramatically-increasing pension costs charged to the County by CalPERS, work with numerous labor groups and MOU’s (I estimate five to seven any given year) and of course, deal with five elected Board members who have very diverse perspectives.

Jeff has private sector experience as well as 14 years in various positions and responsibilities with the County. I wish him well!

Fireworks

As many of us know, this past Fourth of July was an incredible spectacle of illegal and dangerous fireworks being set off all over the County. Our unincorporated areas had several wildland fires that had no fire engines assigned for a period of time because of the extreme off-the-charts volume of 911 calls occurring.

Our firefighters and law enforcement were absolutely overwhelmed in many communities. The Board of Supervisors is awaiting a staff recommendation on how to manage, regulate and, perhaps, allow safe and sane fireworks in designated parks, lake edges, etc., while simultaneously cracking down on the illegal and dangerous fireworks that caused so many fires and caused pets to run away. Stay tuned.

COVID-19

While California is one of the few states that has continued to prohibit indoor gym activities, and one of the last to open schools and allow youth sports activities, we are finally seeing much better statistics on infection rates and declining hospital impacts, and the trends are all good.

The vaccine supply continues to be a significant challenge for all the public and private vaccination sites in our county (and our state), but we are doing better. We have had over 400,000 doses administered already in Riverside County.

Now that things are going much smoother, the State has ordered a change in the vaccine management. Management and accountability for future vaccination programs is shifting to Blue Shield and Kaiser Permanente. County and private vaccination facilities will be receiving direction from the two statewide third-party administrators.

In the meantime, until told otherwise, the County will continue to host clinics for eligible residents, and our mobile clinics will still target hard-to-reach demographics and communities. See what is available and who is eligible here: https://rivcoph.org/COVID-19-Vaccine

Budgeting Begins

The never-ending cycle and process of developing and updating the County budget is underway. The COVID impact to our county-run healthcare system, the impact to our economy and jobs, funding from the State and Feds to help backfill some of the related expenses, the cost of healthcare and pensions, all have direct or indirect impacts to the County budget and the services provided to all 2.4 million county residents. The Board (and public) receives a mid-year budget briefing on Tueday. Like all Board meetings, you can watch live online, or see the recording later. Our meetings also always start with a COVID-19 update from our Public Health team. https://livestream.com/rivcolive/bos.