The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Four seek 1st District Riverside County supervisor seat
For the first time since the Obama administration, Kevin Jeffries won’t be a Riverside County supervisor.
That’s what will happen in 2025 with Jeffries, a 12-year incumbent, not running for reelection in the board’s redrawn 1st District, which represents about 500,000 people in Good Hope, Highgrove, March Air Reserve Base, Mead Valley, Meadowbrook, Perris, Riverside and part of Jurupa Valley.
Hoping to succeed Jeffries and win a four-year term on the board are former Democratic Assemblymember Jose Medina; state Sen. Richard Roth, D-riverside; Western Municipal Water District board member Gracie Torres; and community activist Debbie Walsh. The four are on the March 5 primary ballot.
There will be a winner if a candidate gets a simple majority of the primary vote. Otherwise, the top two vote-getters for the nonpartisan office will face off in the November election.
The county’s five supervisors oversee public services for 2.4 million in the nation’s 10th most-populated county, one roughly equal in land area to New Jersey. County government has more than 20,000 employees and a roughly $9 billion budget that’s grown dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jose Medina
A former high school teacher, Jurupa school board member and Riverside Community College District
board member, Medina represented parts of the 1st District in Sacramento from 2012
to 2022.
“I want to continue the good work I did” in the legislature, Medina said, including securing funds for UC Riverside’s School of Medicine and The Cheech museum in downtown Riverside.
“I think I actually have the most elected experience that stands me out from the other three candidates.”
Medina also has been vocal in calling for increased board oversight of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, which is independently led by an elected official in Sheriff Chad Bianco. The department has been in the headlines for a string of jail inmate deaths, lawsuits stemming from those deaths and a continuing civil rights investigation by the California Attorney General.
Medina supports creating an oversight board to scrutinize sheriff’s operations, something he said is possible through state legislation he sponsored.
His other priorities include reducing homelessness and bolstering mental health care. He supports California’s Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment or CARE Court, a program geared toward those struggling with mental illness and substance abuse that’s active in Riverside County.
Medina said he’d push the county to work with labor unions to set up apprenticeship programs for students, who “probably are not as aware as they should be about apprenticeship-type programs (and) pathways to the middle class.”
Richard Roth
Like Medina, Roth, who can’t run for reelection due to term limits, was first elected to the legislature in 2012 and had a hand in securing state money for UCR’S medical school. The 32-year Air Force veteran, whose duty stops included March Air Reserve Base, retired with the rank of major general in 2007 after serving as a military lawyer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps.
Roth said he’s running for supervisor to implement programs he helped start in Sacramento.
“I have had significant experience managing largescale enterprises, both in the Air Force and in the law business,” Roth said, adding that his management skills “sort of set me apart from the other three who are running for the office.”
Roth said he would focus on bolstering mental health services and the county’s nine-figure savings account while making sure the county recruits and retains “the workers that we need in order to provide the services that the county provides.”
“We need to move the money where it needs to be and we certainly want public safety to be a priority because that’s what the public expects,” he said.
The Sheriff’s Department, Roth said, “has to comply with the law and if there are indicators that something’s wrong in the department, then the board has an obligation to investigate and take corrective action” in the form of a citizens’ oversight panel, independent investigator or board-appointed monitor.
Gracie Torres
Torres has been on Western’s board since December 2018. She’s also a water chemist and water quality compliance planner with the Riverside County Flood Control and Water Conservation District and is an adjunct chemistry professor at Cal State San Bernardino.
Torres, who would quit her county job if elected, said she’s running because “I care so much about my community and as a county employee, I understand intimately where change needs to happen.”
Torres said: “I’m here for the long run. I’m not using this (office) as a stepping stone or as my second option.”
State and federal government policies “are leaving us with less money in our pockets. (The) cost of living is rising,” said Torres, who supports “regional partnerships” to address homelessness, mental health and “tangible economic relief.”
Touting her work creating “a workforce development pipeline to create more water and wastewater jobs,” Torres said she would work to make the county more business friendly. “There’s a lot of executives making a lot of money sitting in meetings and I would like to change that too,” she said.
Torres’ fellow water board members censured her in 2022 for what they said was disrespectful behavior toward staff members. More recently, she received a reprimand for not properly disclosing that she is the subject of a complaint filed with California’s political finance watchdog agency.
“I’m somebody (that came) in wanting to see real change (and) transparency … and that’s not been very popular,” Torres said, calling the censure and reprimand “politically motivated.”
Torres said she supports a sheriff’s oversight committee and separating the sheriff from the coroner’s office, a move supporters say would end a conflict of interest regarding coroner investigations of deaths at the hands of deputies.
Debbie Walsh
A former legislative aide to Jeffries’ predecessor, Bob Buster, Walsh ran for the 1st District seat in 2016 and 2020.
“I want to bring back leadership, accountability and transparency to the supervisor’s office,” Walsh said via email, adding that her five years’ experience as a supervisors’ legislative assistant “has allowed me to see the many challenges that are not being adequately addressed by the county today such as crime, homelessness, public safety and veterans services.”
She added that she’s attended “thousands” of board meetings and other county agency public hearings on the public’s behalf. “I am not beholden to special interest groups and developers. I have the education, knowledge and experience to improve Riverside County.”
Walsh, who said she’s “been fighting against massive warehouses for over 20 years,” supports a moratorium on warehouse development. She supports seeking state and federal dollars to build veterans housing on March Joint Powers Authority land eyed for warehouses.
Walsh said she’d fight to lower the number of homeless people being bused into the city of Riverside from surrounding areas and to locate mental health facilities outside of that city “to reduce the large numbers of people with mental illness being released (there).”
She also wants to put Riverside Transmission Reliability Project transmission lines underground. Overhead lines “pose a substantial fire risk to the residents of Riverside, Jurupa Valley and Norco,” Walsh said.
More oversight of the sheriff’s office “is not needed at this time,” Walsh said, adding that Riverside County residents “overwhelmingly approve of the way Sheriff Bianco runs his department, having voted him into office twice.”