From the September 20 Desert Post Weekly . . .

Reprinted with a sort of implied permission


With Fall comes change...

This week we celebrate the first day of fall, a time of year usually associated with change. And while we may not see very many changing leaves here in Palm Springs and California's Coachella Valley, we are seeing plenty of other changes.

Most notable is probably the change in Sheriff, which was announced this week after Riverside County Sheriff Bob Doyle unexpectedly quit the position to take a job with the state parole board. This change is creating quite a stir here in the valley, as many people are a little less than excited about three people on the board of supervisors making a decision that is normally determined by hundreds of thousands of voters. Not to mention the fact that the board's selection seems to go against the decision those voters made last year when they elected Doyle with a 73% majority. Instead of appointing Doyle's undersheriff Neil Lingle, the board has appointed someone Doyle fired earlier this year, Stan Sniff.

Apparently this board of supervisors has been harvesting bad feelings about Doyle like a Coachella Valley date farmer harvests medjools, and a vote in favor of his undersheriff would have been a vote for the status quo, according to those sups. Yes, and, in case you were wondering, that's the same status quo the supervisors' constituents approved with a 73% majority last November.

It's funny, all this chatter about how lousy Doyle was comes as a complete surprise to this rat. Which is weird, because The Rat's always looking for someone new to rip. But I guess it really doesn't matter now since Doyle's as good as gone. The Rat would've really liked to know about all of this animosity, say, LAST NOVEMBER, when Doyle was up for re-election. Where were all the Doyle-bashers then?

Three years is a long time for an appointed person to sit in an elected position, and three people on the board of supervisors certainly don't speak for the more than one million registered voters in Riverside County. Something needs to change: Let's hope the county can get its act together and organize a special election in 2008.

A uniform change to become more uniform

Another much needed change, according to a panel of tourism experts who recently assessed the valley, is the valley's view of itself. In order to attract more tourism, these experts say, the desert needs to start looking at itself as one area, not Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Indian Wells and LaQuinta.

Now this doesn't come as much of a surprise to this rat. While many of us can't tell the difference between Cat City and Rancho Mirage (about $50,000 in property value), Cat City, Rancho Mirage and the others certainly have done a good job at carving out their own identities within these arbitrarily assigned borders.

And The Rat understands why the cities have made sure to incorporate what they can and define their boundaries well. Sales tax collected in Cathedral City stays in Cathedral City, instead of sending it out to the county to be spent on, say, crappy voting machines (as is the case with Bermuda Dunes and Thousand Palms).

But we need to ban together as a single tourist destination if we're really going to take our level of attraction to the next level. After all, if people wanted to visit a desert with sectarian factions competing against each other they could just join the military.

Change could be good for our health

And the winds of change are a blowin' in the state legislature as well--Blowing around all that hot air. Usually this time of year the senators and assemblymembers are maxin' and relaxin' after the final few grueling weeks of regular session. But this year we seeing a change from the norm as the Governor has called a special session in order to continue to examine the health care reform initiative, which was rushed through the legislature and subsequently vetoed.

The special session will mean the legislature can continue to try and find a solution to the state's health care crisis, but The Rat is sticking with his usual prediction in bureaucratic situations such as this: A lot of chatter, but no actual change. The change the legislators are looking for is a medicare type system which would cover all Californians but still let us choose our own doctors.

Despite this last ditch effort, The Rat thinks you're more likely to see Schwarzenegger and the Nunez/Perata legislature out begging for change than actually changing California's broken health care system.

And if the effort actually passes, we're still not sure how it would be funded. We all might have to start begging for change to afford such an undertaking.