Jose Medina for Riverside County supe

With the upcoming retirement of Supervisor Kevin Jeffries, voters in Riverside County’s First District have an open seat to fill. While each of the four candidates have something to offer, this editorial board thinks former Assemblyman Jose Medina is the

Running in this race are Gracie Torres, who serves on the board of the Western Municipal Water District; businesswoman Debbie Walsh; state Sen. Richard Roth; and Jose Medina.

Walsh previously challenged Supervisor Jeffries in 2020 but came in third place. Of the four candidates, Walsh was the only candidate not to respond to a candidate survey from our editorial board to help us get a better sense of where she stands on the issues. Based on her campaign website, her issues are similar to what they were four years ago. She wants to impose a moratorium on warehouses and wants to increase police spending. Those may or may not be popular or justifiable ideas, but we still have no reason to believe she’d be an effective member of the Board of Supervisors.

Torres offers a more progressive perspective to the race, as well as tangible public service experience on a water board. However, compared to the other two candidates in this race, we’re not sure she has the experience necessary to oversee a county government as complex as Riverside County. We encourage her to run for another post.

Which brings us to Sen. Richard Roth and former Asm. Jose Medina. Though this a nonpartisan race, both are Democrats with state legislative experience. Both tout their record of delivering state funding to Riverside County. Both tout expanding Riverside County’s behavioral health services as a top priority. And both present themselves as having the experience and relationships in Sacramento needed to address the county’s ongoing transportation and health care services needs.

For this editorial board, a key point of difference between the two is their stated approach to the county’s sheriff’s department.

You’ve seen the headlines. Historically high jail deaths. An ongoing state civil rights investigation. Lawsuit after lawsuit filed against the department. Deputies arrested for serious misconduct. Deputies losing large quantities of drugs. A county sheriff with delusions of grandeur more interested in a doomed run for governor than fixing his own department.

If you care about law enforcement, you should care about accountability and ensuring public confidence in law enforcement. And on that front, it’s clear the Riverside County Board of Supervisors has been content to allow Sheriff Chad Bianco to take the department off a cliff as he yells “Yeehaw!”

Medina is clear on what he wants to do. He wants to see the coroner’s office split from the sheriff. He wants to see an oversight body put in place and an inspector general installed to see to it that things are going as they should. Roth, by contrast, is beholden to the same deputies union that recruited Bianco to run for sheriff in the first place.

Jose Medina gets our endorsement.