The report, titled “After a Decade of Record Deaths in County Jails, the Community Deserves Transparency Through Oversight,” urges county leaders to establish an independent civilian oversight body to monitor jail operations and review critical incidents involving inmates.

 According to the Grand Jury, Riverside County remains one of the largest counties in California without a formal civilian oversight system for sheriff operations and county detention facilities. The report concludes that current oversight mechanisms are largely internal and lack the independence necessary to identify systemic issues or maintain public confidence.

 The findings come amid years of scrutiny surrounding Riverside County’s jail system. In 2023, California Attorney General Rob Bonta launched a civil rights investigation into the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office following concerns over a rising number of in-custody deaths and allegations involving jail conditions.

 The Grand Jury reported that 29 inmates died while in Riverside County custody between the start of the state investigation and April 2026.

 Jurors found that investigations into inmate deaths often lack independence and that public reporting on jail operations remains inconsistent and limited. The report also criticized the Sheriff’s Advisory Committee, concluding that it has not provided meaningful oversight or produced documented recommendations regarding jail operations.

 To address those concerns, the Grand Jury recommended that the Riverside County Board of Supervisors establish an independent civilian oversight body with investigative authority, dedicated staffing, public reporting requirements and the ability to review critical incidents and deaths occurring within county jails.

 The report also recommends an independent audit of jail medical and mental health services, the creation of a public data dashboard and the development of a long-term strategic plan for county jail operations.

 The recommendations revive a debate that surfaced last year when the Board of Supervisors considered creating an oversight body for the sheriff’s department. In July 2025, supervisors ultimately declined to move forward with the proposal.

 Sheriff Bianco responded forcefully to the report, rejecting its conclusions and accusing the Grand Jury of advancing a predetermined agenda.

 “The report is nothing but an attempt to pressure the Board of Supervisors into creating an oversight board and/or inspector general,” Bianco said in a statement. “The report is ridden with inaccuracies and patently false statements, combined with apples-to-oranges comparisons.”

 Bianco argued that the report reflects a misunderstanding of jail operations and the factors contributing to inmate deaths. He maintained that most deaths occurring in county custody involve fentanyl overdoses, suicides, natural causes or inmate-on-inmate violence rather than failures by jail staff.

 According to the sheriff, Riverside County’s correctional facilities continue to serve as a model for other counties throughout California and already operate under extensive state oversight.

 Bianco pointed to the California Board of State and Community Corrections, which regulates jail operations statewide, as well as ongoing court-ordered supervision by the Prison Law Office. He argued that the Grand Jury failed to adequately consider those existing oversight systems before making its recommendations.

 The sheriff also disputed claims that inmate deaths represent a systemic problem.

 “Going to jail does not prevent anyone from dying,” Bianco stated. “No one has died because they were in jail, they died while they were in jail.”

 He further contended that demands for civilian oversight are being driven by political activists rather than evidence of widespread misconduct within the department.

 The sheriff pledged that his office will submit the legally required response to the report but indicated that he does not intend to implement the oversight recommendations.

 “We will not implement any of their recommendations concerning oversight,” Bianco wrote.

 Under California law, Civil Grand Jury reports are advisory and do not carry the force of law. However, agencies named in the reports are required to provide written responses addressing the findings and recommendations.

 The Riverside County Sheriff’s Office has 60 days to respond formally to the report, while the Riverside County Board of Supervisors has 90 days to issue its response.

 Whether county leaders act on the recommendations remains uncertain. The report, however, ensures that the debate over transparency, accountability and oversight within Riverside County’s jail system will remain a prominent issue in local government discussions for months to come.

Source: Riverside County Civil Grand Jury Report, News Channel 3 (KESQ), Riverside County Sheriff’s Office statement.

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The agency’s bimonthly report, based on metrics for western Riverside County and the cities of Ontario and San Bernardino, indicated that the Inland Empire’s Consumer Price Index was up exactly 1 percent.

BLS officials said Wednesday the principal driver behind the increase was retail gasoline prices, which jumped 11.6 percent between the beginning of April and the end of May. That in turn pushed the energy component of the CPI up 8.6 percent for the entire two-month period.

Prices went stratospheric as a result of the Mideast war.

Other contributors to the index’s upward trajectory were food prices and apparel costs, which advanced 1.5 percent and 3.3 percent, respectively.

Conversely, shelter costs — or property rents — trended marginally downward throughout the region in April and May, slipping 0.1 percent, and costs in the household furnishings category fell by 2.3 percent, according to the BLS.

Nationwide, the overall CPI registered a .5 percent increase for the month of May. The impetus, again, was energy costs. For the one-year period ending May 31, the national CPI was 4.2 percent.

In the Inland Empire, the year-over-year CPI was 3.4 percent, measuring a host of economic inputs from May 2025 to May 2026, data showed.

The most notable upward pressures in the annualized CPI were reflected in the energy and healthcare components of the regional index, moving up 20.9 percent and 5 percent, respectively.

The current rate of inflation reflects the price trajectory impacting most sectors of the economy.

Energy price shocks that began at the end of February are directly connected to commodities markets and oil trading, which turned bullish immediately after the joint Israel-U.S. military operations against Iran, beginning with a missile attack on a girls’ school, where almost 200 Iranians were killed. The nation’s supreme leader and multiple members of his family were also assassinated. Hostilities abated amid peace overtures in April and May but have recently resumed with intensity.

Iran declared a quasi closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where tankers carrying nearly one-fifth of the world’s energy supplies must pass. The U.S. Energy Information Administration has characterized the narrow Persian Gulf sea lane as a “chokepoint.”

Accelerating consumer price hikes have also been blamed on loose monetary policy and excessive federal spending, decaying the dollar’s purchasing power.

The national debt is now $39.2 trillion, according to the congressional Joint Economic Committee’s “Debt Dashboard.” Some projections indicate the debt load will almost double in 10 years or less.

Fortune magazine reported in April that federal payments just to cover interest on the debt total $88 billion a month.

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The sweeping regulations, finalized at the start of the month, put producers in a bind that has no obvious solution. Plastic clamshell containers, for instance, protect berries from being crushed and keep them fresher, longer until they reach a refrigerator. Plastic producers say there’s simply no substitute — yet under the new rules, they’ll have to find one. 

Last week, two environmental groups — the Natural Resources Defense Council and Californians Against Waste — said they plan to take California to court. Their argument: the state’s rules actually break the law by allowing recycling methods that create a lot of toxic waste, and by letting some plastics slip through the rules entirely. On the other side, plastic manufacturers say the rules go too far and will make products more expensive for shoppers.

Sen. Ben Allen, a Democrat from coastal Los Angeles County who authored the plastic waste law, said the program still “massively moves the needle on this really major problem” — even if the process was messy. “This was the product of a compromise, and it was not perfect, and everybody walked away from the table, you know, unhappy about various aspects,” Allen said.

“California is the United States, but 30 years in the future,” said Joe Árvai,  director of the University of Southern California’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. “What’s happening now is emblematic of trends that we are seeing worldwide … and the U.S. needs to adapt in the way that those countries are adapting in order to remain globally competitive.”

Less plastic, more recycling 

For decades, the burden of reducing, reusing and recycling plastic waste has fallen on consumers. Once a consumer buys a product, they decide what happens to it — whether it ends up in the garbage can or the recycling blue bin — and their tax dollars fund recycling systems we have today.  

In 2022, California’s landmark Senate Bill 54, the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act, shifted that responsibility to businesses. The regulations outline what materials are covered by the law and who counts as a “producer” of plastic waste.  

The new regulations are a huge milestone, said Anja Brandon, director of U.S. plastics policy for the Ocean Conservancy. “There’s plenty more steps on this journey, but I’m just really excited that we are going to start making real progress,” she said. 

The law applies to plastic food service ware and almost all single-use packaging — from the plastic wrap around large pallets of products shipped to retailers to a tube of toothpaste and the cardboard box around it.  

To carry out the law, the Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery appointed the Circular Action Alliance, a nonprofit that helps states carry out extended producer responsibility mandates, as the organizing body for producers. The alliance is responsible for coming up with  a plan to meet the law’s goals. 

Producers — defined as companies that make more than $1 million in sales and produce products packaged in plastic or own brands under which those products are sold — must join the organization and pay fees to fund waste management. They can meet the law’s requirements by using less plastic, finding alternative materials, or investing in recycling infrastructure.

“The biggest challenge is the scale and coordination required to modernize a complex recycling system across a state as large and diverse as California,” said Sheila Estaniel, a spokesperson for the Circular Action Alliance, in an email. 

California’s requirement that businesses reduce single-use plastic altogether makes it one of the strongest plastic waste laws in the country. It also goes further than other similar laws because it requires plastic producers to pay $5 billion over a decade to address the environmental damage their products have caused to communities — though the state doesn’t expect to start distributing those funds until 2027 at the earliest.

Watered down rules

The plastic waste rules have had a rocky road to implementation. 

In 2024, CalRecycle developed a first draft of regulations detailing what plastic the law covers and what producers must do. The draft expired before CalRecycle finalized it. In 2025, Gov. Gavin Newsom directed regulators to rewrite the rules — a move that some advocates say say food and agriculture lobbyists pushed for.

The result was a second draft that carved out a broad exclusion for plastics used for food and agriculture purposes, covering products under the jurisdiction of the FDA and USDA, such as packaging for fresh produce and supplements. Advocates said the exclusion gutted the law.

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“The differences (from year-to-year) were subtle,” UC Riverside School of Public Policy Dean Mark Long told the board Tuesday. “Infrastructure was a little bit more emphasized this year than last. I didn’t come away with any surprise. These surveys are useful information, but I wouldn’t take them as purely what you should do as supervisors.”

Long, as well as two graduate students — Andres Gugig and Esther Mejia — were retained by the county Executive Office to conduct the 2026-27 Community Budget Priorities Survey over the winter. The online polls took place ahead of a series of community workshops held in each of the five supervisorial districts.

The surveys taken during the workshops provided only a very small sampling of opinion, while the online questionnaires received wide participation, with a total 26,543 respondents, according to documents posted to the board’s agenda Tuesday.

It was the second year the county commissioned a countywide survey. The previous one, completed in winter 2025, reflected that the highest level of interest was in public safety.

While the latter slipped into second place this year, it was a marginal difference from public works, which landed a 64% rating among all respondents, compared to 60% for public safety.

The other priorities were healthcare at 53%, human services at 49%, government finance at 23% and “internal services” — the public sector’s inter-agency operations — at 4%.

The survey team said “key words” were the determinants of how to classify respondents’ answers to the online questionnaires. For public works, terms such as “road maintenance” and “pothole repairs” were what amplified understanding of residents’ priorities, according to the team.

“People could write whatever they wanted,” Gugig told the board. “But I think if it was things that affect them on a daily basis, that’s what they wrote about.”

The team said poorly lit and damaged streets, or corridors where flooding is an issue, would push a higher number of responses into the public works category.

The Second District’s residents responded at the highest level, with just under 7,000 respondents to the survey. The district encompasses Canyon Lake, Corona, Eastvale, Jurupa Valley, Lake Elsinore, Temescal Valley and multiple other communities.

The lowest response rate was in the Fifth District, where there were 4,435 respondents. The district includes Banning, Beaumont, Calimesa, Hemet, Moreno Valley and San Jacinto. Most of the survey takers were English speakers, though 599 responses were exclusively in Spanish.

One Fifth District resident and a frequent commentator on county business, Roy Bleckert, told the board the survey results should speak less to what the supervisors should do and more of what they should refrain from doing.

“Practically everything that comes through here, as you grow the government monster bigger, makes the lives of everyone in Riverside County harder,” Bleckert said. “The more you spend, the worse everything becomes. When do you start to drop, like Sweden did, the influence of government and empower the people you serve?”

Another speaker, Veronica Langworthy of the Third District, touched on a similar topic, saying the results reflected how the board can make people’s lives better by reducing government red tape.

“If you can drop fees to adopt animals from county shelters, how about dropping fees for humans?” she said. “It’s impossible for people to house because of the fees from government on property.”

Supervisor Jose Medina said he found the results “helpful as we look at the budget decisions we make and the priorities we set.”

The entire survey can be found at rivco.gov/budget.

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Democrat Malia Cohen has served as controller (AKA California’s chief accountant) since 2023, and has raised more than $1.2 million for the race to keep her seat. She oversees spending for a state with a budget of nearly $350 billion and one of the world’s largest economies. It’s her job to make sure the state spends wisely and efficiently. 

As the governor and the Legislature hash out a budget deal for this year, Cohen has urged caution, saying higher-than-expected spending “reinforces the need for restraint.”

Cohen also has improved the state’s ability to deliver a key financial report that was chronically late for years. Cohen made up the backlog by releasing four reports in two years, and she told CalMatters that the upcoming report (called the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report) will almost be on time — late a mere two months, compared to the years others were delayed.

While running for office in 2022, Cohen told CalMatters she planned to scrutinize the state’s homelessness spending and take a critical look at the Employment Development Department and the Department of Motor Vehicles. A 2024 report by the state auditor found that California fails to adequately track its homelessness spending.

Cohen did not meet those campaign promises. She said that’s because the state auditor had already looked at those agencies. Instead of duplicating that work, she decided to focus on improving some internal functions of the state’s financial arm. She’s in the midst of ongoing efforts  to modernize FI$Cal — the IT system that manages the state’s finances — and the system that pays state employees.

“The bottom line is that I do believe that Californians deserve to know where their money is going,” she said. “So that’s what I’m working to do.”

Cohen’s main challenger, Republican Herb Morgan, has promised to pick up the slack he says his opponent has dropped. Like Cohen promised in 2022, Morgan said if elected, he will carefully scrutinize the state’s spending on homelessness. He wants to create a system where every time a state-funded nonprofit pays for anything, that transaction goes into a state database. Then, he said, he’ll use AI to monitor those purchases and flag anything suspicious. 

As an example of how state spending can be transparently tracked, a public dashboard on his website logs his campaign donations in real time. He’s raised $367,000 as of the end of April. 

Morgan acknowledged he’s an outlier as a Republican running in a state historically dominated by Democrats. But he believes voters will look at both candidates’ qualifications instead of voting along party lines. 

“I don’t care where you are on the social spectrum, 99% of us are fiscally responsible,” he said. “It doesn’t mean cutting spending. It doesn’t mean defunding. It just means being responsible with our money. And that, I think, appeals to all political ideologies.” 

Also running is Meghann Adams, a Peace and Freedom Party candidate. A school bus driver who lives in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, she is president of her union and manages its finances. If elected, Adams promised to expose corporate landlords that drive up rent prices, analyze the cost of imposing a single-payer Medi-Cal system and divest state investments from companies that support Israel’s war against Gaza. 

She’s raised $16,000 as of the end of April.

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Those are some of the details in a new batch of files on UFOs that the Pentagon began releasing on Friday as President Donald Trump taps into the public’s long-held curiosities about “unidentified anomalous phenomena” in the broader universe. Though the Pentagon has been working on declassifying the documents for years, Trump put attention back on the topic months ago by teasing a major UFO document dump.

“Whereas previous Administrations have failed to be transparent on this subject, with these new Documents and Videos, the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’ Have Fun and Enjoy!” Trump wrote Friday in a Truth Social post.

Trump’s Republican administration says the public can draw its own conclusions with the information in the files, which includes old State Department cables, FBI documents and transcripts from NASA of crewed flights into space. A new Pentagon website housing the documents on UAPs has a decidedly retro feel, with black-and-white military imagery of flying objects displayed prominently on the page, with statements displayed in typewriter-like font.

Experts urge caution around the release of the new files, warning that UAP videos are often misinterpreted and mischaracterized by those unfamiliar with military technology. A 2024 Pentagon report rebutted claims that the U.S. government has recovered alien technology or confirmed evidence of alien life.

Files describe numerous sightings of UAPs

The initial release is a trove of videos, other imagery and testimony that is sure to stir more speculation among those who believe we are not alone in the universe.

For instance, a State Department cable from the U.S. Embassy in Tajikistan in 1994 details how one Tajik pilot and three Americans saw a brightly lit UAP while flying a jet over Kazakhstan. The object, according to the cable, was “making 90 degree turns, doing corkscrews and maneuvering in circles at great rates of speed.”

That’s not the only instance of erratically moving objects cited in the document release. A military report from the Aegean Sea in 2023 cited a UAP flying just above the surface of the ocean and making “multiple 90-degree turns at an estimated 80 mph” (129 km/h).

One interview with a U.S. intelligence official details an incident last year in which the official, doing a search on a helicopter, encountered a “super-hot” orb hovering over the ground, traveling about 20 miles (32 kilometers) at a speedy clip, then spotted four or five more orbs that flared up and down.

In a 1969 debriefing of Apollo 11 crew members, the astronaut Aldrin recalled spotting several unusual sights, such as a “sizeable” object close to the moon and a “fairly bright light source” that the crew felt could be a laser.

One document details an FBI interview with someone identified as a drone pilot who, in September 2023, reported seeing a “linear object” with a light bright enough to “see bands within the light” in the sky.

“The object was visible for five to ten seconds and then the light went out and the object vanished,” according to the FBI interview.

Another file is a NASA photograph from the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, showing three dots in a triangular formation. The Pentagon says in an accompanying caption that “there is no consensus about the nature of the anomaly” but that a new, preliminary analysis indicated that it could be a “physical object.”

The documents include more than 20 video files showing unidentified objects captured by military sensors in locations from Syria and Japan to North America. The objects range from fast-moving specks captured in the distance to a football-shaped object spotted over the East China Sea in 2022. The most recent video is from Jan. 1 of this year and appears to show two circular lights flying against an inky black backdrop in North America.

Several files include military videos from the past several years that showed small ambiguous dots moving above the landscapes of Iraq, Syria and the United Arab Emirates. The white objects sometimes streaked across the screen in less than a second, while others slowly glided through the air or were followed by the camera.

Other files include written reports from U.S. military service members who were surveilling locations in the Middle East. One report described an object that was “shaped as a bouncy ball” and traveling 483 mph (777 km/h) consistently for at least seven minutes over Syria in 2023.

The object was later determined to be benign.

Among the files are hundreds of pages detailing reported sightings dating to the 1940s. A 1948 report from U.S. airmen in the Netherlands raised concerns about recurring flying saucer sightings. Swedish counterparts saw them, too, and believed they did not come from “any presently known culture on earth,” the report said.

One military video that quickly caught attention on Friday appears to show an aircraft shaped like an eight-pointed star weaving through the air. The video, from 2013 in the Middle East, is probably nothing more than a hot jet engine producing a diffraction pattern in the camera, said Sean Kirkpatrick, a former director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which investigates UAP.

Kirkpatrick said there’s nothing unexpected in the release and warned that without analysis it will “only serve to fuel more speculation, conspiracy and arm-chair pseudoscience.”

Trump administration touts transp

arency on UFO file release

Trump has previously released records related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. that revealed little beyond what was already known.

The Pentagon has been working on declassifying documents related to UFOs for years, and Congress created an office in 2022 to declassify material. Its 2024 debut report revealed hundreds of new UAP incidents but found no evidence that the U.S. government had ever confirmed a sighting of alien technology.

A small group of Republicans in Congress has pressed for further transparency, accusing the Pentagon of holding documents back. A March letter from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., demanded 46 UAP videos identified by whistleblowers. Luna said Friday those videos will be released later by the Pentagon.

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., thanked Trump for “keeping his word” on transparency and disclosure.

“I would like to remind people that transparency won’t all happen at once, it will take some time,” Burchett said in a statement.

Others used Friday’s release to urge further transparency into what the government knows about UAPs. The Sol Foundation, a research group focused on UAPs, pushed for passage of legislation that would force a “thorough” review of classified UAP records “with the aim of providing Americans with the full truth about longstanding government knowledge and programs concerning technologies and vehicles not of human origin.”

“While today’s new step toward a full disclosure of government knowledge concerning UAP is welcome, many more need to be taken to bring an end to the decades of secrecy by which the American people were kept in the dark,” said Peter Skafish, the foundation’s executive director, and retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, a former acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency.

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Let me tell you what is already true, before that vote even happens.

The average price of regular gasoline in California is $5.82 a gallon. The national average is $3.97. Now, I want to be precise about what is and is not driving that gap, because Sacramento is counting on you to be imprecise. Yes, there is a war scare in the Persian Gulf. Yes, the Strait of Hormuz situation has tightened the global crude market and pushed prices up everywhere. But the Hormuz risk hits every state in the union equally. North Dakota drivers do not get an Iran discount. Texas drivers do not get an OPEC discount. The reason a Californian pays nearly two dollars more per gallon than an Iowan has nothing to do with Tehran and everything to do with Sacramento.

Here is where that two dollars actually comes from. Roughly $1.21 of the gap traces directly to the closure of two refineries: Phillips 66 shut down its Wilmington plant on October 17 of last year, taking 140,000 barrels a day of in-state processing capacity off the map, and Valero closed its Benicia refinery at the end of January, four months ahead of its original schedule. Between them, California has lost something on the order of one in every five gallons of refining capacity it had in 2024. The remaining gap is California-only excise taxes, California-only cap-and-trade pass-throughs, the California-only Low Carbon Fuel Standard, and a California-only summer-blend gasoline requirement that no other state demands.

Both companies were clear about why they left. High operating costs. A regulatory environment that, in their words, made it impossible to plan a five-year capital project, much less a fifty-year one. These are not radical libertarian think tanks. These are oil companies — companies that exist to refine oil, in the place that historically refined more oil than almost anywhere else in America — telling the state’s lawmakers that the rules have made the work impossible.

And on May 28, the response Sacramento has prepared is to make the rules stricter.

I’m going to ask you to hold a picture in your head. Hemet is forty-five miles from Riverside. It is seventy miles from downtown Los Angeles. It is ninety-five miles from Long Beach. The men and women who live in our valley and commute to those places — the warehouse workers in Moreno Valley, the trades workers on jobsites in Corona, the nurses driving to Loma Linda, the teachers in Banning — are not making the kind of money that absorbs an extra dollar a gallon without flinching. A household with two cars and a thirty-mile-each-way commute burns roughly twenty-five gallons a week. A one-dollar increase is thirteen hundred dollars a year. Stack that on top of a $5.82 starting point, and you are not asking working families to “do their part.” You are reaching into their kitchen budget and taking it.

State Senator Brian Jones has cited internal projections that California gas could hit $8.43 a gallon by the end of 2026 if refinery closures continue and the new LCFS amendments take effect. I’ll grant that $8.43 is a worst-case number. I’ll grant that no projection is destiny. What is not in dispute is the direction of travel.

Now layer this on top of what we already know about Sacramento’s books. The state is running a structural deficit somewhere between $20 billion and $35 billion a year. It has racked up roughly $125 billion in general fund deficits over the last four years. The Legislative Analyst’s Office — not Fox News, not the Hoover Institution, the Legislature’s own nonpartisan auditors — recently warned that the Governor’s budget is leaning on AI-driven tax revenue projections that they consider unrealistic. We are, in plain English, broke. And the legislative response to being broke has been to make it more expensive to drive to work.

This is the part where the word “abundance” stops sounding like an aspiration and starts sounding like an indictment. Every prosperous society in human history got that way the same way: by letting its builders build under predictable, evenly enforced rules. Refineries are builders. Power plants are builders. Housing developers are builders. Truck drivers and farmers and warehouse operators are builders. When you make every one of those jobs harder, more expensive, and more legally fraught — when the rules apply only to the people who follow them and the people who don’t get a waiver — you do not get a clean, prosperous future. You get a brittle one. A state where a single Strait of Hormuz incident or a single refinery fire sends prices into orbit because there is no slack left in the system.

Here is what I am asking. Between now and May 28, pick up the phone three times.

Look up your own state senator and assemblymember at the Legislature’s official tool — findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov — and call both offices. Then call the Governor’s constituent line at (916) 445-2841. The Governor is the one who appoints the members of the Air Resources Board, and the Air Resources Board is the body that will take this vote.

Tell each of them, by name, that you are watching the LCFS vote, and that you will remember it. Tell them that you have already lost two refineries and you are not interested in losing a third. Tell them you live in a part of the state where people drive for a living and a dollar a gallon is not an abstraction.

The future of abundance that producers produce is still on the table. We just have to stop voting against it.

The post When You Regulate the Builders Out, You Get $8 Gas — Not Abundance appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

In a 4-0 vote without comment Tuesday, the county Board of Supervisors formally approved the Executive Office’s revised “anonymous incident reporting system.”

Anyone associated with county government who has witnessed or become aware of alleged acts that conflict with the county’s Code of Ethics can file reports via www.auditorcontroller.org, or 833-590-0004.

The phone number features prompts, while the website directs visitors to a site listed at the top of the home page designated “Report Fraud, Waste and Abuse 24/7.”

Previously, other online and telephonic reporting methods were available, but they’ve since been deactivated.

“It is the duty of every employee to report any known violation of this (ethical conduct) policy, or what would appear to a reasonable person to be a violation of this policy,” according to board Policy C-35. “Examples of reportable offenses include theft, conflicts of interest, misuse of county equipment or vehicles, embezzlement, bribes and kickbacks, abuse of work hours (and) inappropriate use of county credit cards.”

Policy C-35 was first implemented in January 1991 and later underwent revisions based on the California Citizen Complaint Act of 1997 and related legislation.

The county’s auditor-controller, currently Ben Benoit, is recognized as the initial processor of fraud, waste and abuse complaints, which are then assigned to the appropriate investigating agency, inside or outside the county.

“County employees shall adhere to and uphold the county’s Code of Ethics both in practice and in spirit,” according to the policy. “It is expected that employees act in the public’s interest first and not their own. It is further expected that their behavior, both on the job and off, reflects positively on the county, its reputation and its employees.”

The post See Fraud, Waste In RivCo? Report It Over New Number, Web Portal appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

    The Riverside County Registrar of Voters announced that Election Observer Tours are now underway ahead of the June 2 Statewide Direct Primary Election, offering the public a behind-the-scenes view of the ballot handling process.

    Tours are being held at the county’s election headquarters, located at 2720 Gateway Drive in Riverside. Weekly sessions are scheduled from 4 to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays and from 11 a.m. to noon on Thursdays, beginning May 5 and continuing through Election Day.

    According to the registrar’s office, participants will be able to watch ballots being processed and learn more about the systems in place to ensure accuracy and transparency throughout the election process.

    Each tour is limited to 20 attendees. While reservations are recommended due to limited space, they are not required. Those interested in reserving a spot can call 951-486-7200.

    For those unable to attend in person, the county is also offering a virtual option. Live streams of election operations will be available starting May 5 at voteinfo.net.

    Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco encouraged the public to take part.

    “We invite community members to engage with the democratic process and learn how their votes are counted,” Tinoco said. “Together, we can help ensure a fair, accurate and transparent election for everyone.”

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This seat, which blends portions of Kim and Calvert’s current districts, spans from Mission Viejo in Orange County up into Woodcrest, Menifee and Murrieta in Riverside County. The district was reconfigured under Proposition 50, the ballot measure that passed last year to redraw the boundaries of the state’s congressional districts. The new district includes pieces of the current ones represented by Kim and Calvert and is considered a fairly safe Republican seat.

President Trump would have won this district by 12 points in 2024.

Who are the candidates?

• Ken Calvert: Republican, incumbent member of Congress

Calvert, the longest-serving Republican member of California’s congressional delegation, is a Corona native who was first elected in 1992. He serves on the House Committee on Appropriations.

His legislative priorities, according to his district website, include strengthening the economy, fixing what he calls “our broken immigration system,” advocating for veterans and service members and coming up with solutions for California’s water issues.

• Young Kim: Republican, incumbent member of Congress

Kim was one of three Korean American women who were the first to be elected to Congress in 2020. She won reelection in 2022 and 2024. Kim serves on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, House Committee on Financial Services and House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.

Before she was elected to Congress, she served in the state Assembly for two years. Kim also worked for more than two decades for Orange County’s Rep. Ed Royce during his stint as a U.S. House member.

• Esther Kim Varet: Democrat, art gallery owner

Varet, who lives in Trabuco Canyon, has a Ph.D in art history, criticism and conservation from Columbia University. She is the founder and director of the contemporary art gallery Various Small Fires.

Her priorities include protecting reproductive rights, strengthening schools, combating climate change, immigration reform and rebuilding the country’s middle class, according to her campaign website.

• Lisa Ramirez: Democrat, immigration attorney

Ramirez, a Southern California native, is the owner and partner of U.S. Immigration Law Group. She attended Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and has a Bachelor of Arts from Scripps College in political science and religious studies, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Affordability is a cornerstone of her campaign along with immigration reform, climate stewardship, education and women’s health.

• Joseph Kerr: Democrat, retired fire captain

Kerr spent 34 years as a fire captain with the Orange County Fire Authority and served 17 years as president of the Orange County Professional Firefighters Assn., a labor union that represents more than 1,100 firefighters. He ran unsuccessfully for the Orange County Board of Supervisors in 2018, the state Senate in 2022 and Congress in 2024.

• Claude Keissieh: Democrat, electrical engineer

Keissieh is a U.S. Army veteran who served four tours in Iraq and later on a mission in Afghanistan, a small business owner, an adjunct college professor and an electrical engineer, according to his campaign website.

He previously worked with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to teach incarcerated people how to become electricians, his website says, and last year joined the California Department of Transportation as an electrical engineer.

• Nina Linh: Independent, nonprofit executive director

Linh started the WonderSeed Foundation, a nonprofit that uses neuroscience and technology to help at-risk youth, in 2018 after grappling with her son’s mental health struggles. She previously was a television producer and wrote a parenting book and a series of children’s books.

She’s running as an independent because she feels the “two-party system is broken” and the public is tired of hyperpartisan politics.

Democrat Francis Xavier Hoffman also is running.

Where they stand on immigration

Calvert for years has advocated for immigration reform, which he says must begin with controlling the U.S.-Mexico border to prevent people from entering illegally.

In 1996, he authored legislation that later became the E-Verify program, a tool used by employers to check the immigration status of newly hired employees. In 2023, he introduced legislation that would expand the use of the program. The bill, the Legal Workforce Act, was referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary and the House committees on Ways and Means and Education and Workforce last year.

Calvert told The Times he favors passing legislation that guarantees a secure border and “ends the job magnet.”

“I support a system that rewards those who follow the rules and wait their turn, not one that gives a fast pass or grants amnesty to those who cut in line,” he said.

Last year, Calvert voted in favor of the Laken Riley Act, which allowed the Department of Homeland Security to detain noncitizens who have been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting. Kim also voted in favor of the legislation.

Kim has identified border security as a key issue in her campaign. She voted in favor of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which allocated $46.5 billion for border wall construction and additional funds for hiring Border Patrol agents. Calvert also voted in favor of the bill.

On her campaign website, Kim states that former President Biden “opened our border and purposely created a crisis that overwhelmed law enforcement and allowed deadly fentanyl to flood into our country.”

“It’s simple: enforce our laws, secure the border, no amnesty and put American safety first,” she wrote.

Varet supports the DREAM Act, which if passed would offer a path to legal status and citizenship for thousands of DACA recipients — undocumented people who were brought to the U.S. as children and given federal protections — and other undocumented minors, according to her campaign website. She also is in favor of legislation that would reduce green card backlogs, establishes a path to citizenship for people who have been in the country for a certain number of years, for people who have passed a background check and those who have worked in the agricultural industry.

She wrote that “undocumented immigrants already living in the U.S. and their children cannot and should not be removed other than for legitimate criminal justice or immigration law violation convictions.”

She supports providing a path to amnesty and providing funds to boost the number of immigration judges, consular officers and naturalization officers.

Linh, who came to the United States as a refugee from Vietnam as a young child, told The Times she supports “secure, orderly and lawful immigration.” She added that a functioning immigration system would protect everyone, including those who seek to enter the country.

“Real reform means a funded immigration court system, smart technology at ports of entry, and cooperation with origin countries on root causes. It means agents who identify themselves, follow the law, and are held accountable when they do not. It means a legal pathway that works, not one so backlogged that doing things right means waiting 15 years,” she said.

As an immigration attorney, Ramirez believes America should provide permanent legal status and a path to citizenship for Dreamers and immigrants who have contributed to the country for years.

“Our immigration laws need an overhaul and to be brought into the 21st century, giving workers more flexibility and options for people who are waiting decades to complete the legal process,” she told The Times. “In the meantime, we need to keep our communities safe from unlawful ICE enforcement while supporting effective community policing, accountability and trust in law enforcement…”

Kerr said immigration policies aren’t working, noting that it’s not simply a choice between “open borders and cruelty.”

He supports expanding immigration courts to eliminate backlogs, protecting Dreamers and creating a pathway to citizenship for people who contribute to the U.S., simplifying the process of legal immigration and boosting accountability for Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations to ensure enforcement is focused on real public safety threats.

“We can enforce the law with strength and we can do it with basic human dignity. These goals are not in conflict,” he wrote on his campaign website.

Where they stand on climate change

In 2024, Kim co-sponsored the Championing Local Efforts to Advance Resilience Act, proposed bipartisan legislation that would authorize $100 million annually over five years to help states strengthen infrastructure and prepare for extreme weather and natural disasters. The bill was referred to the House Committee on Financial Services.

In May 2025, Kim partnered with Rep. Dave Min (D-Irvine) to introduce the Building Resiliency and Understanding of Shrublands to Halt (BRUSH) Fires Act, which aims to boost wildfire mitigation efforts in shrubland ecosystems.

Kim and Calvert also co-sponsored bipartisan legislation to improve the health and resiliency of giant sequoias, which have been threatened by California wildfires.

But Kim also faced criticism from environmental groups for voting for legislation that reduces environmental regulations.

Calvert told The Times he favors focusing on “mitigating for a changing climate instead of imposing more taxes and regulations that kill jobs and make everything more expensive.”

He opposes California’s Cap-and-Invest program, which sets a declining cap on greenhouse gas emissions from major polluters, and believes the Trump administration was right to stop the state’s efforts to ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035.

The solution to climate change, Calvert said, is “water storage … better forest management to stop these catastrophic fires before they start and investing in infrastructure so we can better handle whatever Mother Nature throws our way.”

In February, Calvert announced he’d helped secure $67 million for Riverside County infrastructure projects, including several water-related projects, as part of an appropriations package.

On her campaign website, Varet said she will “demand responsible, science-based solutions” to protect the public and keep the country competitive.

She vows to support legislation that would hold large fossil fuel companies accountable for climate change, repeal tax breaks for the oil and gas industry and advance the transition to renewable energy.

“Pollution and climate change threaten not only our national forests but our health, our homes and our quality of life,” she wrote.

Linh told The Times she will push for mandatory modernization of utility infrastructure to prevent power lines from sparking fires, invest in forest and vegetation management and modernize water infrastructure and early warning systems.

On emissions, Linh said she believes “incentives and innovation will always outperform heavy-handed mandates.” She supports expanding clean transit options, incentivizing employers to adopt flexible work policies to reduce commute emissions, deploying smart traffic technology and giving small businesses tiered time lines and tax credits to transition.

She also vows to push for federal oversight of insurance companies that abandon fire-prone states like California.

“The climate crisis has become an affordability crisis,” she said. “People who were already struggling to stay housed are now one policy cancellation away from financial collapse. This is not an abstract environmental issue. It is happening to families right now.”

Ramirez supports policies that call for responsible energy development, innovation in renewable technologies, improving energy efficiency in buildings and transportation, and strengthening infrastructure to withstand stronger storms and higher temperatures. It’s critical, she said, to restore the historical function of the Environmental Protection Agency and reinstate protections for air and water.

“Environmental stewardship and economic growth are not opposing goals — they reinforce one another,” she told The Times.

As a firefighter, Kerr said he saw the effects of climate change firsthand. He supports funding for advanced wildfire detection technology, more resources for firefighters, strengthening incentives for homeowners to harden against wildfires, clean energy and climate resilient infrastructure and strengthening federal disaster relief programs.

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