Commonsense COVID Response

`Supervisor Jeff Hewitt is challenging the County Health Officer on the re-opening of Riverside County.`

18 min readJun 26, 2020

Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Hewitt — perhaps the most influential libertarian elected official in the country — joins me this Sunday to talk common sense policy at the county level that he is pushing in Riverside.

We discuss how Supervisor Hewitt has fought back against special interests and all-powerful unions in California to take office, and what he’s doing to get people back to work in his area while minimizing new infections and deaths from COVID-19.

The California Health & Safety Code lays out the functions and duties of local health officers, which include issuing orders to other governmental entities to take “any action any action the local health officer deems necessary to control the spread of the communicable disease.”

In most counties that has meant strict bans on group gatherings, as well closures of schools, churches, and “non-essential” businesses. Furthermore, the law grants broad discretion to health departments to “(a) Quarantine or isolate and disinfect persons, animals, houses or rooms, in accordance with general and specific instructions of the department.” In the past, this has been interpreted to apply to those with symptoms, but since COVID we’ve accelerated into the Brave New World where even healthy people showing no symptoms of illness are forced to shelter-in-place. When will it end?

Supervisor Hewitt and his fellow supervisors in Riverside recently voted to ask the county Public Health Officer, Dr. Cameron Kaiser, to rescind his orders mandating face coverings and closing certain schools. Dr. Kaiser complied with the request — showing that some power still resides in the people and their elected officials.

Finally, we discuss how else we can effectively restore our liberties, and what Jeff’s experience can teach other libertarians seeking to get elected to local or regional office.

Don’t miss it. Listen or read the transcript:

TRANSCRIPT

The Importance Local Government

Bob Zadek: Former speaker of the house, Tip O’Neill, one of the really great politicians in American history, left behind lots of wisdom, including what is the byline for this morning show. He famously said, “all politics is local.” We are reminded of this during the pandemic period that we are living through right now. The reason I make that point is because during the epidemic, the headline grabbing politicians have not necessarily been the president.

So much of the attention has been focused on the governors, the mayors and local health officials, because the police power, which is the broad power given to elected officials given to government over the health, welfare, and safety of citizens, primarily resides in local officials and not in Washington. Most people didn’t even know they had local health officials. It is one of the great swaths of power that have not been taken from states and cities and given to Washington when the country was formed. What could be more of a challenge to health, welfare, and safety than the pandemic crisis that we are living through?

Thus, the attention of local officials.

I thought it would be fascinating to learn from one of the most effective local officials what life has been like on the ground, being a local official governing real people making everyday decisions. I’m happy to welcome to the show this morning Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Hewittt.

Jeff was elected first to Riverside County Board of Supervisors in 2018. He has lived his entire life in rural or semi-rural California. He has brought to local politics a libertarian point of view.

Jeff, welcome to the show this morning.

Jeff Hewitt: Hey, thank you Bob. It’s a real pleasure to come on the show and share my experiences over the last several months.

Bob Zadek: You were elected to the City Council in 2000 and then became the mayor to Calimesa. What were the challenges of being the mayor of a city that size?

Jeff Hewitt: Calimesa is a city of 8,500 people. It is the second smallest of 28 cities in Riverside County. It is a city that was formed because the bigger city next door, Beaumont, was going to incorporate a huge new development and the people of Calimesa said, “We want to have our own city.” So they went ahead and formed it back in 1990. We have one fire station. Our city hall is made of manufactured buildings, so to speak. We’ve never actually built a full city hall.

When I got there it had a $6 million annual budget and there are 11 full time employees that work for the city. Then we contract out some of the other services. But I’ll tell you what, it pays $300 a month. So it is a paid position, whether you are mayor or whether you’re one of the four other city council members. I call it the Rodney Dangerfield of cities because it gets no respect from either neighbors. If you don’t know where Bob’s Big Boy is on Interstate 10, that goes right through our city, then you wouldn’t know he exists. I was on the council for two four-year terms.

I would suggest to anybody else considering getting into politics and being a representative for your constituents to get started by getting appointed to a commission. I was in 2004 on the planning commission. You will find out if you can stomach it. People are going to call you things you didn’t know existed in the dictionary.

Party affiliations and the importance of teamwork

Bob Zadek: You have been a libertarian since early in your adult life. When you ran for public office, first for city council and then mayor, did you run on a libertarian platform or did you present yourself as Jeff Hewittt, a smart guy willing to commit time to public service? Did being a libertarian matter?

Jeff Hewitt: it is a nonpartisan race. Whether you’re an independent Republican, Democrat or libertarian or Green, those things are secondary. Most people will know what you are. When you’re walking around knocking on doors and trying to and when you’re campaigning people will ask you, well, what are you registered as? Or what’s your political affiliation? And I would generally say, well, first of all, this is a nonpartisan office. So each individual issue that we go over we take on its own merit. However, my principles are libertarian, and those are my guiding foundational values. I believe the government is there to protect our individual liberties.

Now a lot of people want public safety and roads done by the government and that’s fine. If that’s what the majority of people want and they think they can do it well then, then it’s my job as an elected to make that be done in the most efficient manner possible and give the highest quality service to them in that way. So you can still be a libertarian and you don’t have to believe in total anarchy. Being the chairman of the planning commission is probably the single best position you can be in if you’re running for a county council position. This gentleman who was very active in the democratic party said to Jeff, I would love it if you would run, I’m not going to run next time.

When he did that word got out amongst the Democrats that he was backing a libertarian they asked him why and he said that I had some great ideas. You have to get past the labels. Most people are what they are. They carry that, that label of a D or an R. But no matter what, you have to do is gain their trust and respect and then they start listening to you. You don’t want to take anything away from anybody, that’s very dear to them. That’s like their religion in some respects. But what I found out is being an elected politician had more to do with your ability to make solid relationships with your colleagues. Your ability to govern is directly proportional to your ability to persuade your colleagues.

A Small County Fights CalFire

Bob Zadek: You got a lot of attention while you were a mayor with municipal unions involving the local fire department. You achieved great success when in the beginning one would have bet, bet against you. Just tell us very briefly about that battle with local municipal unions, in this case firefighters, and what you learned from the experience.

Jeff Hewitt: At the time, like most of the cities in Riverside County, they go ahead and they contract for their fire service through the County. And then the County course uses Cal fire, which is a state agency to supply all their firefighters. Cal fire department is the largest fire department in the state with a hundred different stations and over a thousand firefighters that work actively for them. Calimesa had their one station and the union was forcing Riverside County’s Cal fire to start having their engines have a staffing of three at all times. We’d always had a staffing of two.

And it had served us very well, but because we had such a small budget and because it was already taking up so much of the budget, that was going to add another $750,000 per year to add that third firefighter and it wasn’t really going to increase any safety. So the union was pushing hard for this. We weren’t going to raise the taxes because I couldn’t justify it. There are so many retired people in Calimesa. I went ahead and went all in and convinced my colleagues against their better judgment and got my staff onboard and we pulled off really what almost every other elected around me considers a miracle and it was good.

Bob Zadek: What was the result in the city?

Jeff Hewitt: The result in 2017 on January 1st at midnight at the changing of the year, Cal Fire drove their engine out with their crew and we brought in our new minted engine that we had purchased. Our firefighters had 401k defined contribution pensions, which are totally sustainable. We had a staffing of four instead of staffing of two or three, and we were saving a million dollars a year just in current costs on our fire department. It was an amazing feeling. We took on fire, which are considered the heroes.

I said, look, if you think it’s suicide to take on fire, then in my book, you’ve already committed suicide by not following your constituents concerns and giving them to a special interest. I’m not the favorite of Cal Fire as you might know. However, I now sit on a board of one of five that controls the largest Cal Fire fire department and I’ve treated them with respect and everything else. I will do whatever for my constituents because that is who I work for.

Bob Zadek: As an elected official in a small city in California, you have had a more profound per capita effect on the people you represent the citizens than probably any elected official, any single elected official in a county, state or a federal legislative body. And I’m saying head to head, the effect you have had in economic terms on the people you represent is greater than any of the effects of the house of representatives have had on the citizens they represent. And that speaks so much to the importance of local government. The closer the government is to the people, the more direct and profound the effect you can have on their lives. It is just almost goosebump-causing how you can in one single action help your constituents so much.

You ran for Riverside County board of supervisors. Now just Riverside is just a word, but it’s an important county. What is Riverside County in size and population and in significance?

Jeff Hewitt: Riverside County is big in the sense that its population is larger than larger than 14 or 15 States in the United States. It is the fourth largest County in California and the 10th largest County in the United States. It has 2.5 million people. There are 500,000 people in my district. It has 23,000 employees and it has about a six point $6 billion annual budget. When I moved from the council of Cala Mesa to the board of supervisors, everything went up by three zeros.

What I was most I was most proud of in Calimesa, by the way, was building a team. I couldn’t have done anything by myself. There were so many people involved that I am so proud to know and call friends now and whether they’re libertarian or not is secondary.

You don’t blow anybody off. My biggest antagonist during that, who had done things to me that most people would never forgive, became my biggest ally in creating that. And that’s what I want to drive home. Your being in public office is not to do with your ego. You always have to remember who you work for and as you build up momentum, you can actually get things done.

Riverside County is big. It takes over an hour to drive from one side of my district to the other. There are six cities in my district. One of them has over 200,000 people, which is the second largest city of Riverside County, Moreno Valley. And we have one of the fastest growing cities in the nation.

We may very well have another libertarian on a city council in Menifee. I’ll tell you a little bit more, Bob, about what a County does and why a County supervisor has so much influence over people’s lives in their County in California. They basically carry out almost everything that the state mandates. The state and the legislature will make up all these policies and rules and different taxes and everything else that people follow.

But it’s not the state that really puts it through. They have a lot of their own agencies. But the County, we have 42 different departments. Everything from entitlements, food stamps, section eight housing, child protective services, adult protective services, public safety for the sheriff, the district attorney, etc.. We have our own County hospital with over 5,000 employees. Riverside County could be its own entity and state just because of the size. We have five people, myself being one of them, who have ultimate say over just about everything in that.

Bob Zadek: How many citizens are in Riverside County?

Jeff Hewitt: Two and a half million.

Bob Zadek: So you have five people who have legislative control over two and a half million people. On a per capita basis, you have an enormous amount of power over the lives of a large number of people. it is direct power. You affect their lives every day. So county supervisors are very important in the allocation of political power. All politics is local. The policies are made, regretfully, at the state level, but carried out at the local level. So the state gets to decide the policies, doesn’t necessarily fund them, and delegates them to the counties to carry them out.

Now, Jeff, when you ran for County Riverside County supervisor in 2018, was your election competitive? And if so, where the issues you ran on politically in the sense that your political affiliation mattered? Or did you get elected because you had done such a wonderful job at the city council and mayoral level?

Jeff Hewitt: When [one of the other supervisors] retired, I saw an opportunity where I was the mayor of one of the cities in the district and it was a nonpartisan office. In other words, when you go in on the ballot, it’s not going to say what you are, because libertarians always have a tough time overcoming that bias. There were a couple things about this race that were very intriguing to me. In 2016 I’d run for the state assembly as a libertarian in a partisan race. And in 2014, in a special election for the state Senate, I had gotten six and a half percent, which I was very proud of.

This one was unique in the sense that it was nonpartisan, but it also was one of the few races that had no limit on individual donations. So I thought, I don’t have that big donor base that a lot of the established parties do. But I did have a good relationship with one wealthy libertarian up in Sacramento, Chris roofer who owns Morningside and processes a good portion of the tomatoes consuming the United States and a longtime libertarian donor. One of the more important elements was a man named Boomer Shannon.

Boomer had always run different cannabis legalization campaigns. He’d run some other campaigns for people running for office. And he said, Jeff, I’ll help you. But I thought he was too busy with other things. I started out with another campaign manager. When Boomer came on, everything changed.

Jeff Hewitt: Steven Greenhut actually had said, Jeff, tell me something. I’d like to write something about your fire department. I talked to Steve and he wrote the article, came out in the Orange County register, all of the Southern California news groups, and then it went into Reason magazine immediately, and I got national attention from that. He said we need that as a fundraising tool. I was able to send that out to some, some donors and such and I was able to get enough money to all of a sudden be competitive now in the entire campaign. And believe me, it was a year of my life working harder than I’ve ever done anything.

When you want something bad enough and when it’s actually that important, again, you work a lot harder than I ever worked. Boomer Shannon did the same thing. He came up with a great plan and we ended up beating an opponent who was a former assemblyman Republican who had raised one point $4 million and we beat him with a little over 500,000. That was one of the biggest upsets ever in the county history and it was even more dramatic because when the first numbers came in I was 13% down. I was devastated. I wanted it to be a close race. It looked like I was going to be just annihilated over the next three weeks. A month later after the election, I won by 4%.

It’s all about teamwork. Build a team. Once you’re in office, you haven’t accomplished anything. Now you have to start working. Having libertarian values allows you to always fall back in any time when there’s an issue.

Unfunded Mandates: Top-Down Pension Planning

Jeff Hewitt: The largest unfunded mandate in California are our pension mandates. Those are unfunded liabilities, but they’re mandates because the legislators made laws where they have guaranteed outcomes. I’ll talk about CalPERS because Riverside County is the second largest employer after the state of CalPERS in California. So we have at this point right now a three and a half billion dollar unfunded liability.

In other words, that’s what’s owed right now that we don’t have on just the promises that we made to existing pensioners and existing employees. And that’s what I set out to conquer. Up until the covid situation that has been number one on my plate. I’ve been inside the treasury back in Washington DC. I have a personal relationship with the CEO of CalPERS and I’m putting together a package that hopefully will guarantee most of those pensions for those that have been promised it.

Bob Zadek: CalPERS is the state agency that basically administers the pensions and establishes the economics for the pension of all California governmental employees. You as the county are required to in effect hire CalPERS to run your pension system and they just bill you at the end. So it’s a question of top-down control. In our case, Sacramento sets the policy and that’s where all the politicking goes on between the unions and the state and they send the counties the bill. Is that a fair summary?

Jeff Hewitt: That’s pretty darn close. I will give a shout out to one of my heroes, state Senator John Morlock who might be the utmost expert on this. He has a CPA and everything and he has been working almost single handedly to fix this. So I got to give a shout out to him. Riverside County has a lot of leverage. So CalPERS does listen to me when I come up and say things.

Now what’s happening in real time that as those unfunded liabilities get larger, the minimum payments get greater. We’ve already shoved off so much of this on the next couple of generations, which is morally bankrupt in itself. We only have so much money coming in and we’ll have a lot less post covid, that these mandatory payments take away from our ability to hire sheriffs or send out someone with child protective services to protect the child. All these things come down and at our service level, pretty soon we just become a pension supply agency instead of an agency that supplies public services.

The Covid-19 one-size-fits-all policy

Bob Zadek: And as a supervisor, you lose the power to decide how to spend your local tax dollars because it all gets sucked into the pension. Now that brings us to the current topic. The tension that became created between Governor Newsom and other Governors and the local counties. Tell us about your problems with Newsom’s approach for the entire state and what that tells you for the need for local control.

Jeff Hewitt: We’ve got 58 counties in the state. Alpine County has 1200 people. LA County has 10 million. Obviously what fits in Alpine County has no relationship whatsoever to LA County. That’s why the top-down approach never really works all that great. Riverside County was very instrumental in the early days of this. Remember it was late January when there was a charter jet that landed at March air reserve base in my district in Riverside County with 195 U.S. citizens that have been diplomatic people over and moved on. And it was our own public health officer, Dr. Kaiser, who was the one that put a 14 day warranty on them. Then the federal government followed it. We showed dynamism.

As it evolved in California, Governor Newsom was one of the first ones to put a full lockdown, a shelter in place order. I got caught up in that too because early on we were looking at a disease that might have the mortality rate of a SARS or MERS and it spread like the flu. That’s the worst case. Well, it turned out it wasn’t and its mortality rate is much lower than we originally thought. It’s more like a typical seasonal flu.

As this went on, it became more and more partisan, like a political bludgeon to use one way or the other. And I started plotting all the numbers myself. I do have a degree in biology, a bachelor of science from San Bernardino state. And I realized this is not what people are saying it is. Having been a small business man all my life I don’t know if we can fix this damage. You can’t say profits or lives. They’re combined. Then the governor came out with his criteria, the most ridiculous one being that we couldn’t have one death in 14 days due to COVID.

In a large country like ours, that is impossible. Anybody should know that. So I became very upset with the governor. This was putting my citizens at risk. The governor is not a king. So I pretty much said we should probably go against those orders. I could not convince my colleagues to do that. Fortunately right now we are getting to this stage 2.5 where restaurants can open as well as retail stores.

I would love to see gyms and baseball games and everything else going right now. But I am doing some things with antibody testing. Riverside County will have the gold standard of antibody testing by the end of June. I don’t get caught up in the partisanship, that is not going to do any good for anybody. I look at it very objectively and bring in everything from all sides and try to make the right decision.

Bob Zadek: Riverside County has found that the one size fits all, obviously cannot and does not work. You have been outspoken in your opposition and have actually resisted enforcing governor Newsome’s edicts on the virus. Is it naive to expect that the counties will declare their independence and insist on more local control? Is it utterly naive to expect this?

Jeff Hewitt: No, I don’t think it’s naive. Those changes are going to have to be made at the ballot box. Whether they think that any of the eight constitutional offices of the state need to be changed. Or if the makeup of the state assembly and state Senate need to be changed. That is going to have to come from voters. In three to six months when we see the complete fallout from this economically, there’s going to be a day of reckoning. I think there is going to be a lot of politicians that are going to be very uncomfortable in the way that they bought into tactics of fear and such.

Not to mention just all the wholesale usurpation of our constitutional rights. That is still the founding document and it is the core of everything this country stands for. I’m more proud to be a libertarian than anything. I mean, that’s what drives me, but we can’t be so partisan right now. We have to work together for our constituents.

I look forward to building more and more coalitions with other countries. I have four colleagues on the board. We have one African American, one Hispanic, we have a Jewish woman and two white guys and we have two Democrats, two Republicans, and a libertarian. We have a very diverse board and it came about that way organically.

We don’t always agree, but at the end of the day, if we could work as a group for our constituents, then good things will happen. I’m very excited about the future. We’re going to get through this and hopefully they allow takeout margaritas.It’s getting so bad that it will create a change. Those things need to happen. This state is amazing. We should be in the greatest Renaissance of all time.

Bob Zadek: The service you have performed is demystified and maybe even un-demonized so that when the pepe you represent see you in action it will make so much sense that it will make our point of view more welcome at the table.

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Did California Just Declare Itself a Nation-State?, with Frank Buckley, April 23, 2020
John Tamny on Experts vs. the Wisdom of Markets, with John Tamny, May 10, 2020
Prime time for the PRIME Act, with Rep. Thomas Massie, April 30, 2020