Supervisor warns higher trash fees coming

By Kevin Jeffries
County Supervisor, First District

Kevin Jeffries

The amounts will vary, but grab hold of your wallets because county trash bills are likely going to up significantly. Several factors are going to put the squeeze on your pocketbook:

(1) 8.6% inflation is hitting everyone hard, particularly in fuel-intensive businesses like waste disposal;

(2) Costs to operate the local landfills are going up and will be passed along.

(3) Another significant cost increase hasn’t hit us yet, but it’s headed our way, and that is a state-mandated requirement that trash haulers require a separate container and processing of “organic” waste from all businesses and homes in California. Early speculation is $3 to $10 more per month depending on the community/city where you reside.

A Growing Rage

We have a beautiful county that offers diverse settings (mountains, desert, Wine Country, lakes, historic downtown areas, etc.) And while our communities keep growing, unfortunately so does the level of frustration. It really boils down to a quality of life question: How much is enough?

Quality of life concerns include crime, homelessness, the cost of living (to name just a few) and of course the other big one, our endless gridlock! Gridlock on our state-owned highways (91, 15, 215 and Ortega Hwy) is never ending, and Caltrans has mostly been converted away from building freeway capacity and instead into a highway maintenance agency.

The gridlock is not confined to our freeways, but also overwhelms many local roads such as Cajalco, Temescal Canyon Rd, Van Buren, Alessandro, Bundy Canyon, Washington, etc. To make things even more challenging, the state mandates that counties and cities must provide for more affordable housing to be constructed. Across our county, we must add 167,351 more houses, including 40,000 in unincorporated/non-city areas. An example of what some cities are required to add: 18,458 in Riverside City, 13,627 in Moreno Valley, 7,805 in Perris, 6,681 in Lake Elsinore, and 2,715 in Wildomar.

During my community meetings the same question is always asked of me, “How much is enough?” “How many more homes (affordable or not) must we add?” “How many more warehouses, how many more vehicles, how much more water (the biggest water district in Southern California just announced dramatic restrictions on water use)?” “Will our infrastructure needs ever catch up?”

I recently had a respected friend suggest that our county (and cities) need to implement a “pause” in issuing permits until we can get on a path towards resolving our quality-of-life challenges. He’s not wrong, but the paths (solutions) won’t be easy. I doubt that a “pause” will happen (mainly because of our private property rights), but clearly, we are in trouble and need to rethink, How much is enough?

County Locking Out Qualified Job Seekers?

With over 70% of county residents 25 years of age and older not having a college degree, and with most or many job openings at the County of Riverside requiring some form of degree as the default qualification, is the county locking out hundreds or thousands of otherwise qualified applicants from seeking and obtaining local employment?

At a time when our departments are desperate to fill vacant positions, we need to determine if we are handicapping our own efforts. Our office is going to propose that the county do a little soul searching. We need to determine what unnecessary barriers we have created to employment across multiple job classifications and look for ways to make the county application process and eligibility criteria more user friendly for our constituents and potential future county employees.

Turpin Report Being Held Up

For those of you following the hard-hitting news coverage on the Turpin children and the reported partial breakdown of services to assist those and other children (and adults) who need care and assistance, it is taking longer to get to the bottom of this issue than we had hoped.

The short version is, the retired federal judge who was hired by the county to conduct a full investigation into the various social services, has not been able to obtain court authorization to conduct the deep dive and evaluate what went wrong and what needs to change.

It has been reported elsewhere that the county is withholding these documents, but a court must approve any investigation into the care of juveniles as their privacy and the services they receive is fully protected by state law. This is one of the reasons these cases can so easily get stuck in the bureaucracy.

The final report is now due at the end of May, but if you would like to read the initial update from the Ad Hoc Committee (which I was appointed to) on what the county is doing to improve services, and/or my expanded official comments on the matter go to https://tinyurl.com/AdHocReportMarch29 and/or here https://tinyurl.com/JeffriesAdHocComments.

Break Out the Weed Eaters!

Although I’m not sure it ever ends anymore, the traditional wildland fire season is kicking off. The grasses/weeds/fuels are tall and quickly turning brown.

During my previous volunteer firefighter days, the homes that had good clearance of ground vegetation and tree limbs around them were the easiest to defend and save. So do yourself and your local firefighters a favor and help them help you and make sure your property is ready.

A Contact Sport?

Three seats on the Board of Supervisors are up for re-election in 2022. Yet only one seat drew a challenger – that being in the Fifth District (Hewitt).

While the other two incumbents (Spiegel and Perez) have worked very hard and are thoroughly engaged in their respective districts, which certainly discourages opponents, I can’t help but wonder if the political environment (at nearly all levels) has become so confrontational and hostile that people aren’t as interested in running.

Many good people are just not willing to run the gauntlet or have protesters in front of their homes or be confronted while shopping for groceries. Seeking and holding elected public office is not for the faint of heart, or for those with thin skin.

Elected officials meet a lot of really good-caring individuals and some really hard-nosed cusses, but it seems like more and more of the latter lately. But that does come with the job.