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View Winners → Pasadena Independent Praised for Investigative Reporting
Opinion Feb 14, 2015
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The people of Pasadena are lucky they have a newspaper that is covering this information. The owner of the Riverside paper, the Press Enterprise, retired, and it was sold to a Texas corporation that then gutted its staff’s ability to do this kind of investigative reporting. It has since then changed hands again.
Meanwhile, Michael Beck was hired as City Manager by the City of Riverside WITHOUT ANY SEARCH FOR, OR INTERVIEW OF OTHER CANDIDATES. I know; I was there objecting to this hire.
Why was Beck hired without any search for candidates? I think it’s because our then-Mayor, Ron Loveridge, knew Beck would participate in covering up what already had been taking place for years, under the “leadership’ of the previous City Manager, Brad Hudson, who, with Loveridge, had concocted a redevelopment scheme, the so-called “Riverside Renaissance,” that has left local citizens forced to overpay utility bills, sewer charges, and more, and stripped local services so that, for example, the annual expenditure on public libraries is only 25 cents per citizen per year. (I think Pasadena was spending at least $4 a year on library services).
Beck had worked at the University of California at Riverside, where our multi-term Mayor, Ron Loveridge, was continuing to accrue pension credits while on repeated annual leaves to serve six four-year terms as the City’s Mayor. (This means Loveridge is getting pensions from both the UC system AND from the City of Riverside; a recent salary poll showed that some unnamed associate professor at UCR is making $680,000 annually, and I bet that it’s Loveridge.)
So Loveridge knew Beck before extolling his virtues as a City Manager — an accolade Beck received despite his lack of ANY experience as a city manager.
I hope this newspaper continues to dig deep into this story!
Letitia Pepper
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