Riverside County Political Update: Chad Bianco Battles the Ghosts of County Admin and the Riverside Press-Enterprise

Blogger’s Note – I am planning on being in Riverside County this weekend, please look me up on Facebook if you’d like to meet me. I can be more public now that I know the Sheriff is not a comic book villain.

Pretty much everyone I know detests the Riverside Press-Enterprise. Part of the reason I did some of the things I did on Right on Daily was because the P-E abdicated their responsibility as journalists. They refused to report the truth about the condition of the department. It has been alleged to this blogger that the senior editor and a few of the reporters were way too close to Stan Sniff. (Rumors varied from being drinking buddies to the P-E Staff being panty-wasted cowards intimidated by the tyrannical former sheriff)

It is the opinion of this blogger that a public post put out by a P-E Reporter for a Story on CCW Issuance is being done in a lame face-saving attempt to show that Sniff Really wasn’t that bad. The P-E was so fully invested in Stan Sniff that they have to try and restore their own reputation now that the red lights are shut off outside their office door.

You’d think that the P-E would have gotten a clue. Earlier in March they did a story about the hiring spree going on now that Stan Sniff is gone. Chad Bianco said clearly, “We Don’t have a budget problem, we had a Sheriff Problem”.

“The culture of our department – blaming everybody else for our problems, misinformation to the public, the complete lack of honesty and transparency from the sheriff’s administration to the Board of Supervisors (and) the executive office, the lack of trust, the lack of sharing, the lack of cooperation – all of that has to change,” Bianco said.

It appears that the P-E missed their part in the above quote. Lies of omission or parsing words because you are too close to the Sheriff or you are a coward and afraid of him count in that culture. In case that is not obvious, yes I just called the P-E Liars and/or Cowards.

The P-E has given Stan Sniff way too much ink in all their articles since he was overthrown. I also take note that Jeff Van Wagenen, who was highlighted in earlier posts allegedly trying to give some of Sniff’s former Management a soft landing, is quoted speaking typical nuanced bureaucrat speak:

“I’m not going to use the words ‘dishonest’ or ‘deceptive,’” said Van Wagenen, who is independent of the sheriff. “But again, Sheriff Sniff had complained in the last couple of years that the board cut his budget … the sheriff’s budget has actually grown every year since 2012-2013.”

Numbers provided by Van Wagenen show the sheriff’s budget growing from $538 million in fiscal 2012/13 to $672 million last fiscal year. Net county cost – what the county general fund contributes to the sheriff’s budget – grew from $224 million to $276 million over the same period.

I’ll say it for Jeff. Sniff Lied and mismanaged the money the department was allotted. Perhaps all that time spent Stan Sniff spent retaliating against enemies of the state was more of a brain-drain than we’ll ever know…

… which makes the coming Press-Enterprise whitewashing of two year wait times for CCW Permits all the more egregious. Sheriff Chad Bianco has made it clear that the money is in the budget to speed them up. In fact, the wait time has been slashed.

It was put to this blogger by a confidential informant that the Sheriff wants to use a 3rd party vendor that will process CCW applications for a very low price – at no cost to the county mind you – and do the preliminary background checks. They promise a crazy fast turnaround, too.

This seems to be too much for the Riverside County Administrative State to handle. The swamp creatures, fearing a loss of control are throwing up roadblocks. If you remember, there are maintenance backlogs on vehicles, oil changes cost $300 and the like because the County has a no-bid monopoly on vehicle maintenance. There is little incentive to change that system because of hundreds of make-work county jobs that would be lost if that racket was dismantled.

So – the County Admin people are saying Sheriff Bianco has to go through “purchasing” and other red tape BS before he can finally streamline the CCW process. Your intrepid blogger fears he may have to start naming these bureaucrats by name. Perhaps the new supervisors can demonstrate some leadership and crack the whip on these feckless obstacles to efficiency and change for the citizens.

I sent some links about the awful CCW history of Stan Sniff in a vain hope that the P-E Reporter would do his job. I realized that one of the forums that was replete with people complaining of waits as long as 26 months for an interview was wiped clean. This must have happened sometime in September of 2018 as I re-verified all of my information around labor day. It appears that H Paul Payne, the scumbag (that’s what I think of him) that controls the NRA in California had his buddies at the CRPA clear off the derogatory references to the Sniffmeister.

Too bad for Payne, the CRPA, Sniff and others… I got screenshots and archives.

The Cal Guns foundation actually Sued Sniff in 2018 over his abusive CCW Practices. The CRPA only threatened a suit in 2014. That threat was also exterminated from their website.

Then there is this expose’ your intrepid blogger put together.

Thats true.. I mean 2018 till an interview is what one guy said….. you know how many deputies are on limited duty and on disability ect they could throw in that division? they could put like 20 guys in there.. BTW, the two deputies that are in there now are super super guys .. Frank Yezzo is a great guy and one of the JUST TWO deputies in that division… and very easy going in the whole process but again, its almost like you should just CCW on your own at that point of waiting.

The other was Frank Aguirre who appears to have sold out for a “Tap” position from Sniff.

Unpack the comment. In a county of 2.4 Million people Sheriff Sniff has limited the number of people processing CCW Permits to 2.

I have a current CCW from another county. I’m told by Riverside county that I have to begin the process over in their county, taking the safety course from one of their vendors and I have to interview. They gave me an appointment in January 2019!!

This comment was from 3-27-2017 and was deleted from the CRPA forum page.

Here are two more specific stories about preferential treatment for donors.

The department is in complete turmoil because we have not had strong leadership from Sniff nor Diyorio. When the leaders don’t lead, all the rest of the nonsense that you have been writing about begins to happen (thermal station scandal, cheating scandal on the detective tests in 2015, then cheating on the Lt and Caps test in 2016, sergeants and lieutenants in admin positions not working full days…which has become part of the culture at those ranks etc etc). This agency has been a ship adrift for years now and it is sad.

Second word, ethics. It is true (and I have witnessed it first hand) that if you are a FOS (friend of the sheriff) you will go to the front of the line to get a ccw. If you are john q citizen, it’s a 18 month to two year wait. All department members know about this, from the office staff, to the deputies and above. We see the Sheriff campaigning on duty or having his people do it for him (Purvis on the dept owned gator with a Sniff campaign sign etc. etc) and know full well that if we were caught doing something like that for Bianco we’d be gone.

That’s right folks. The P-E, H Paul Payne and others attempted to cover this CCW thing up and now the P-E is getting ready to whitewash the whole thing. The P-E is whitewashing Sniff’s fiscal mismanagement, too.

If the P-E was interested in journalism, they’d have been running stories about the corruption of Stan Sniff for years.