One year after residents overwhelmingly voted in support of its creation, the city of Riverside is one step closer to appointing a local government watchdog.
The Riverside City Council voted 6-1 Tuesday to formally create the Office of the Inspector General, which would serve as a neutral party responsible for investigating fraud, waste and abuse within the city.
“I want to emphasize, this is a starting point,” Councilmember Steven Robillard said at the November 18 meeting. “This is literally just to get the office off the ground and get this thing started.”
Last year, two-thirds of voters supported Measure L, which amended the city’s charter to create the office. Since then, a subcommittee, headed by Robillard, has worked to establish the job’s parameters. The council was set to vote on the creation of the role at its October 21 meeting, but voted 4-3 to delay the discussion after Robillard requested an extension to rework language that established the office’s ability to obtain outside legal counsel.
“I am very confident we have fulfilled that duty to make sure that this is an independent office and free to do what it needs to do,” Robillard said at last night’s meeting.
A previous version of the proposed ordinance gave city council discretion to allow the office to use outside legal counsel. The revised language, presented Tuesday evening, would give the city attorney the power to approve spending of up to $25,000 for outside counsel, with the city council required to approve spending beyond that amount. The ordinance also lays out guidelines on how to proceed if three or more council members were subjects of the investigation.
Rebecca McKee-Reimbold, interim city attorney, said at the meeting that the specified amount was chosen because it mirrored the budget city council previously set for the city attorney’s office to retain outside legal counsel.
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“What that allows [the] city council to do is to maintain at least some degree of control or say in the budgetary issue,” Mckee-Reimbold said. “Twenty-five thousand dollars is still that threshold where you guys have an ability to be kept in the know in terms of the amount.”
Councilmember Clarissa Cervantes also expressed some concern over parts of the revised language at Tuesday’s meeting, believing that it could put the city manager in a difficult position if they had to approve the additional spending for the inspector general.
However, she added that she felt comfortable voting for the revised ordinance, asking whoever takes on the position in the future to recommend changes to the council if they felt there were areas of concern with the independence clause.
The inspector general’s independence has also been a recurring topic among residents. Public commenters, at the October meeting, called into the council meeting to critique the previously submitted ordinance. That call-in feature, however, malfunctioned during Tuesday’s meeting, leaving out the ability for residents to remotely weigh in on the updated language.
The city council also approved setting a maximum salary range of $217,213 for the role and gave the new office a total annual budget of approximately $785,000. Most of the cost would be offset by eliminating the city’s audit division, according to the city staff report. That department’s tasks would be folded into the duties of the inspector general’s department.
Councilmember Philip Falcone was the sole no vote. He told The Riverside Record that his vote was purely on principle as he authored the ballot argument against Measure L.
“Just a matter of staying true to principle and staying true to the way it always has been,” Falcone said. “I think the budget’s too high, I think that there’s still ways that it could have been dealt [with] better.”
Councilmember Sean Mill, at the meeting, also suggested that the city council should look into dissolving the ethics board as he believed having both would be redundant.
“So [I] just want to plant that seed, because I think the ethics board has run its course once we have an Office of the Inspector General,” Mill said.
The city council and mayor, according to the November 18 report, are set to conduct the hiring process to appoint an inspector general. A city spokesperson said the process typically takes an average of three to four months.
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