Supervisor predicts first balanced budget in years

By Kevin Jeffries
Riverside County Supervisor, First District

Kevin Jeffries

Public Hearings/Money Meetings – With the federal government handing out lots of money to counties and cities, topped off with strong jumps in local revenues (thank you home sellers, workers, and private businesses for keeping people working), your county government might actually enjoy its first truly balanced budget in a dozen or more years (if we electeds don’t screw that up).

If you want to offer some budgeting suggestions, feel free to attend the budget hearing on Monday and possibly Tuesday. As always, agendas and videos for Board Meetings, and a place to submit comments to the Board, can be found at: https://www.rivcocob.org/

New Masters of Transportation? — In a surprising development, there are several bills in the state legislature that would severely limit, or in some communities, completely strip away the authority of counties and/or cities to work together to locally fund and work with state and/or federal transportation authorities to build or widen critically needed transportation corridors.

The general theory of the three bills (AB 2438, AB 2237 & AB 1778) is that if new capacity (e.g., widening) is added to our major roadways, more people would use those improved roads, which then in turn could or would harm our climate. This would then conflict with the state climate goals, and as such would be automatically denied.

This would even apply to proposed projects that we taxpayers specifically authorized via a tax vote for transportation improvements (e.g., SB-1 & Measure-A sales tax). I am not a fan of having the state take away local control and our ability to improve capacity on our corridors, particularly while the State is mandating that our county (and our cities) add 167,351 more affordable homes/dwellings in our county (on top of the already occurring growth of overpriced housing and commercial operations).

In my humble opinion, there are plenty of good reasons for us to prevent our county from becoming a concrete jungle of Los Angeles-like rooftops and pavement. However, whether you drive a gas or electric vehicle, we all depend on our roads to get to and from work, family outings, vacations, shopping, etc., (and most of us will never see high-speed rail reach the Inland Empire). Handing over these important quality of life decisions to the state (for them to automatically reject) just doesn’t make any sense to me.

A New Face – For those of you who follow planning and development issues in unincorporated Riverside County, local resident and well-known Mead Valley grocery store businessman Shade Awad has been appointed to represent the First District on the Riverside County Planning Commission. Shade replaced Commissioner Bruce Schaffer, who is taking a well-deserved retirement from the position. Thank you to Bruce and Shade.

We Need Smart Reforms – We’ve had a recent wave of home invasions, local store owners are already up to their eyeballs with thieves walking out the front door with $950 worth of stolen merchandise, and residents are dealing with vandals cleaning out homes and/or parked cars, and the severely mentally ill have nearly free rein to do what they want.

Lost among the headlines about previous criminal justice reforms (Props 47 and 57 and AB 109) that have made it increasingly difficult to lock up bad guys for anything except violent crimes is the fact that the state simultaneously went even further in the area of juvenile justice reform.

Our state no longer allows local authorities to differentiate between troubled juveniles who simply need intervention, mentorship, and guidance from those who have literally become hardened, perhaps even brutal, criminals.

Juvenile halls and mandatory treatment or detention facilities are all but gone across our state and are being replaced with residential foster care homes that have little ability to prevent walk-offs or violence against neighbors or staff.

To be fair, it is important to note that nearly all studies indicate that many of our troubled youth do in fact benefit from a non-incarceration approach that utilizes wrap-around services to help them. The downside of course is that the current one-size-fits-all approach by state regulations does not provide for exceptions when dealing with truly hardened lost souls who have little respect for life.

On the adult side, the state is once again evaluating closing up a number of state prisons. Our county jails are pretty much full, affordable housing has extremely long waiting lists for families, so exactly where are they going to go?

Big Boxes or a Big Crazy Idea? — Located between Van Buren and Alessandro, west of the 215, are hundreds of acres of vacant land that was formerly a part of the March Air Force properties and was turned over to the March Joint Powers Authority (JPA) for economic development and job creation.

This site is really the last big chunk of vacant land within the JPA and it is now targeted for mega warehouse developments. But with the future of warehouses looking more and more automated, will most of the jobs they promise be limited to the drivers of tractor-trailer rigs stuck on our congested freeways and roadways?

At the risk of being told I am off my rocker, I can’t help but wonder… is Western Riverside County ready and able to plan and build a truly mega multi-use park instead? A park of such a scale would require significant revenues to build, and then ongoing funding obligations to maintain. Perhaps a crazy concept that combines some business economic opportunities with the big park ideas? And now back to reality…