RIVERSIDE (CNS) – The most senior member of the Riverside County Board
of Supervisors is slated to be appointed today to the position of chairman
of the board — the last time he will serve in that capacity as he closes in on
retirement.
Supervisor Kevin Jeffries, who represents the First District, is next
in the rotation to take the helm, the second time in the 10 years that he’s
been on the board that he’ll be placed in the top slot.
A majority of the five supervisors must affirm the appointment to
chair. Jeffries can vote for himself.
The only time in the current century that a Board of Supervisors
chairmanship was confirmed by a threadbare majority occurred in January 2022,
when Supervisor Jeff Hewitt was appointed. He garnered support from Supervisors
Jeffries and Karen Spiegel, then voted for himself after abstentions by
Supervisors Manuel Perez and Chuck Washington.
Perez and Washington publicly supported fellow Democrat and Moreno
Valley Mayor Yxstian Gonzalez in his bid to unseat Hewitt, a Libertarian, in
the Nov. 8 general election. Yxstian won by a margin of 54% to 46% and will be
attending his first meeting as representative of the Fifth District on Tuesday.
Jeffries declined the chairmanship during his first term, when he was
still the most junior member of the board. However, he accepted the position
and was unanimously appointed during the latter half of his second term.
Each supervisor is given an opportunity to rotate into the chair,
which is a one-year term. The line of succession is based only on whichever
district supervisor is slated for a turn. Washington is expected to be
appointed vice chair Tuesday.
The chair oversees establishing board schedules, guiding hearings,
attending functions on behalf of the entire board, signing proclamations and
other ceremonial duties that don’t require a quorum.
The 61-year-old Jeffries announced in October 2021 that he intended to
retire at the end of his present term, which expires in December 2024. The
Lakeland Village resident said he wanted to spend more time with family, and
most of his children and grandchildren had left California.
Jeffries, a property investor and former volunteer firefighter, first
ran for the board in 2012 after being termed out of the state Assembly, where
he served as a Republican. He was elected to his third supervisorial term in
2020.
He is the only supervisor who has consistently declined salary
increases, and he has been a steadfast critic of excess spending and an
advocate for pension reform to preserve the county’s fiscal health and prevent
successive structural budget deficits.
Jeffries has additionally decried the overgrowth of warehouses
countywide and has voted in opposition to several projects due to their breadth
and encroachments on residential spaces.
He led the charge against illegal cannabis grows, particularly
throughout his district, but later spearheaded efforts to implement a
regulatory scheme to provide a permitting process for enabling marijuana
vendors to do business in the county after recreational use of the product was
approved by voters in 2018.
Last year, he called for a suspension of permitting proposals brought
before the board for review because, he said, too many licenses had been
granted, but the applicants had been inert, failing to move ahead with
establishing their outlets, or failing to fulfill the terms of their
conditional use permits. Copyright 2023, City News Service, Inc.