It was an emotional send off for Supervisor Kevin Jeffries Tuesday morning at the Riverside County Board of Supervisors meeting as supervisors, county staff and public commenters took time to share their appreciation for the long-time elected official.
“The difference between Kevin and many others, and obviously there’s partisan politics, is that you always knew where Kevin was coming from,” Supervisor V. Manuel Perez, who first met Jeffries while they were both serving in the California State Assembly, said. “He was very principled. He never played, ‘Gotcha!’”
That sincerity and directness was a common refrain among the remaining supervisors and county staff who spoke at the meeting.
“I think that’s really what’s one of the most things I’m going to miss, and that is you’re just being open,” Supervisor Karen Spiegel said. “You don’t shoot the breeze, you just kind of say it as it is.”
Along with multiple standing ovations, Jeffries received an oversized gavel and a proclamation during a presentation that he expressly said he did not want.
“There’s one amongst us that hates presentations,” Supervisor Chuck Washington said with a laugh. “And we are torturing him right now with this presentation that he didn’t ask for, that he said he didn’t want.”
It was a fitting tribute to a man who has spent his entire adult life in service to his community. A career that began at the age of 17 when he made the decision to become a full-time volunteer firefighter, working seasonally for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, while studying fire science and applying for almost any open firefighter position he could find in Southern California.
“I was on that path,” Jeffries said in an interview with The Record. “I knew what I wanted to be, and then at some point, something took a curveball on me.”
Jeffries ran for office for the first time at the age of 21, winning a seat on his local park board. However, his first foray into politics was short-lived.
“I lost my re-election to the park board to my school teacher,” he said. “Honestly, I would have voted for him.”
He decided to throw himself back into the fire service, while working construction on the side, and pursuing grants to bring fire hydrants and additional fire service equipment to the Lake Elsinore area. That work, he said, got the attention of a pair of local elected officials: a member of the Lake Elsinore City Council and a member of the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District board.
“[They] come to me and say, ‘We want you to run for the water district,’ and I said, ‘Well, let me go talk to the incumbent,’” he said. “They said, ‘No, you don’t understand. We want you to take out the incumbent,’ and I said, ‘No, you don’t understand. The incumbent’s a friend of the family, I have to go talk to him.’”
After talking with the incumbent water board member, Jeffries ran and won the seat, hiring one of his opponents, current Lake Elsinore Councilmember Bob Magee, to be part of his staff.
“It was all downhill from there,” Jeffries said. “Once I got hooked on being a part of community decision-making and making things happen, I realized I could do more good there than any place else.”
From the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District to the Western Municipal Water District to the California State Assembly, Jeffries said he just loved being able to make things work better for people.
“Everything just kept falling into place for me,” he said.
After serving six years in the Assembly, Jeffries successfully ran for the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, beating incumbent Bob Buster by 1,273 votes in November 2012. He was sworn into office the following January.
“If I could reverse the schedule, I would do county first and then state,” he said. “The knowledge you learn at the local level as a county supervisor, and being able to take that knowledge to the state and be able to articulate why what the state is proposing isn’t going to work out in real life, I wish I’d had that knowledge.”
Jeffries’ longtime Chief of Staff Jeff Greene agreed, with a caveat.
“That would make a lot more sense,” he said. “But you would run your head against a wall going from actually being able to do things here to going up there and not being able to accomplish a thing.”
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Jeffries said that while being in the minority party — he’s a lifelong Republican — did cause some frustration while serving at the state level, the worst part was just the inability to get things done, which is what he said made being a county supervisor so great.
“This is the best elected position in the state of California,” he said. “You actually get to make a difference…because you’re in a position to make it work, and that’s the thing that I love best about this, is just things get done.”
But, he said, not getting trapped in the partisanship that’s currently roiling local, state and federal politics takes work, with everyone bringing into the position their own political leanings, philosophies and beliefs on what good governance looks like.
“When you walk in these doors as a county supervisor, you don’t represent a party, you represent the county,” he said. “You represent all the people in the county, and specifically the people in your district, and they don’t care, as a general rule, if you’re red, blue, green, whatever it is. They just want things done.”
As for what Jeffries is most proud of, he pointed to four things: the construction and improvement of community centers in the unincorporated communities in his district, the legalization of food trucks, additional public safety services throughout the county’s unincorporated areas and increased transparency.
“We really did try to improve public access, public knowledge of what’s going on,” he said.
Jeffries later noted that he wished more people understood more about what the role of a county supervisor is and the services they provide, though if they did, he said, “they’d probably be on our phone every day.”
When it comes to things he wished would have worked out differently, he said much of that was “inside baseball.”
“You know, just trying to reorganize the bureaucracy,” he said. “Government is incredibly inefficient. With the exception of the public safety side of things, there’s almost no rush to do anything.”
Looking at the road ahead for the county, Jeffries said he hopes that the board is able to come together to address what he believes will be “some really tough financial times.”
“I hope they can get through that without drastic cuts to our front line services, to our community centers,” he said. “I hope, if times get tough, that they’re able to use a surgical knife and not a sledgehammer or an ax, to the way they approach it.”
He also said he hopes that the new board will continue to protect and preserve the county’s rural communities, noting that he doesn’t want Riverside County to become like Los Angeles or Orange in terms of density.
“I’m okay with slowing down growth a little bit in our county,” he said. “I’m not ‘no growth’ by any means, but I don’t think we need to go hog wild with rooftops everywhere all the time. We can slow it down a little bit and do it right.”
Jeffries also said he was hoping for a “market correction” when it comes to the warehouse boom that has been changing the landscape of the Inland Empire over the last few decades.
“I’m hoping we have a course correction, and that it slows down dramatically,” he said. “It just feels like it has to, but we also have to recognize we all caused that by ordering online, by abandoning the retail stores and closing them up. We did it to ourselves, and so now we’re paying the price for it.”
One of the most hotly debated warehouse projects Jeffries has been part of is the proposed West Campus Upper Plateau Project at March Air Reserve Base, which the March Joint Powers Authority (JPA) Commission tabled earlier this year on a motion made by Jeffries. Jeffries said he was told that the proposal could come back before the board in February or March of next year, before the land reverts back to county control as the March JPA is scheduled to sunset July 1.
“That’s why it’s so important whoever fills my seat is aware and respecting the neighbors who live adjacent to those lands and how they’re going to be used,” he said.
In addition to listening to the communities around the base, Jeffries said he hopes that the March JPA and eventually the county would listen to and respect the desires of the Air Force Reserve to limit the number of private sector flights at the base.
“I spoke with one of our local congressmen about it, and he said, ‘You could lose that base someday if it becomes too difficult, too complicated, to operate an air base out of there,’” Jeffries said. “That won’t be a quick decision, but it’s a decision that could come with the path that we’re on, and that would be a tragedy for this county.”
Now that Jeffries is retired, he and his wife will be moving to Idaho, where they plan to spend the majority of the year.
“I mean, I’m keeping my roots here,” Jeffries said in an interview with The Record. “We’ll be spending three weeks out of four in Idaho with our kids and our grandkids, but both of our moms are here in Riverside County, so it’s one of the reasons we’re coming back at least one week a month to check in on them and our rental properties.”
And though Jeffries will no longer serve the residents of Riverside County, he hasn’t completely ruled out a return to politics.
“I’m not going to dive into politics up there,” he said. “I might run for a local park board or fire district board or something in a couple of years, but I’m going to wait and see how it goes.”
As for how he’s leaving Riverside County, County Executive Officer Jeff Van Wagenen might have summed it up the best.
“Did you leave it better than you found it, which is really the only thing that any of us can ask for,” he said. “ You certainly did, so thank you for that.”
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