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Crisis, Corruptions and Incompetence |
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Written by James Preston Allen
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Friday, 20 March 2009 |
If you listen to the locals in my neighborhood, there is as much shock over the seventy-five cent increase in the parking meter rate in San Pedro as there is anger about the $165 million bonuses at AIG. Perhaps the Obama administration could just transfer a few million from the AIG bailout to cover our parking for the next few decades!? Ha! That would sound too much like socialism and the merchants on Sixth Street wouldn’t stand for that, now would they? The problem is that no matter which way government tries to solve its budget deficit spending these days, they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
The parking meters are the perfect example. The quarter-per-hour rate hasn’t been raised in some 17 years. It was so low that many employees and even business owners had been parking their cars right on the streets where customers should be parking. This has created the impression of a gross lack of available parking. The City, unable to cope with the lack of parking, raises the rate some 300 percent; Not for the purpose of creating parking, but to raise needed revenues for its projected $425 million budget deficit. Obviously the city is not going to get more than two percent of this from the meters. It solves neither problem. The totally dysfunctional thing with the City of Los Angeles is that after they change out the meters with the new rate increases, they don’t hire more employees to collect the coins.
Now, not only are the meters jammed full of coins, with half of them failing, but the city isn’t making any more money than they did before and the psychological impact is that the streets are deserted because everybody is parking someplace else and walking a few blocks into the downtown. Good to see folks getting their cardiovascular exercise in on their way to work.
Is this really a deterrent to commerce on the street or is business suffering more because the recession has finally hit the jobs on the waterfront? Yes, some businesses have been hit hard by the great recession of 2009 and the question hangs in the air like a bad smell––how far will the stimulus package trickle down to main street America?
The problem for the City and the state is that if they are following the Republican motto of “less government is better government” and they start cutting jobs, then they are only adding to the downward spiral of the economy by adding a percentage or more to the unemployment rate. You can see this logic in Schwarzenegger’s budget that forces school districts to sacrifice teacher’s jobs for the sake of saving the budget. The next thing that he’ll complain about is the declining state of public education. Read state mandated test scores, without recognizing the relationship between class size, dropout rates and student grades. How can the Governator expect schools to reduce class sizes if they keep cutting the education budget so schools can’t hire more teachers?
This is the disconnect and the dysfunction of our system which is a lot like raising parking meter rates but not having enough workers to collect the increase. Of course the people giving out parking tickets can still give you a ticket at a failed meter and if you want to fight that ticket you can take half a day off work and go 26 miles to downtown L.A. and fight it in administrative hearing. That’s if you have nothing better to do with your life but fight some administrative bureaucrat over a $45 ticket.
The battle line should not be drawn over more government or less, not even over how much you pay in taxes to support that government, but rather how big and impersonal your government has become, how much they ignore the aspirations of the people they represent and what true value we receive back from them in services. The real issue has to do with how much representation you actually have in relationship to the size of the district being represented. The problem in Los Angeles, like elsewhere in this 21st Century, is that we have so much government and so little democracy! Our Council districts have the population base of some small cities where there are five council reps plus a mayor– we have only one elected representative. This should be changed even at the expense of growing the government. In L.A. this means instituting a bi-cameral form of governance not unlike the state legislature, creating a congress of neighborhood council representatives.
If there were a congress of NHC to offset the central power of the City Council the parking meter issue would have been meted out far differently. For instance, the parking meter increase would go to pay for more off street parking structures to support downtown businesses and there would be a direct link between the tax and the service rendered. Most of the time in big government there seems to be no clear nexus between the tax and the service rendered.
If the city and the state need to raise taxes, as they do, then they are going to have to radically change their thinking–health care should be subsidized by a tax on California’s second largest agricultural crop, marijuana. Decriminalization of just this one drug would do many things all at once. It would reduce costs for law enforcement, take thousands of non violent drug dealers out of our overcrowded prisons, put millions of dollars of black market profits into the tax system and it would allow the government to regulate the age and place of consumption and sales while controlling the quality. Think of how much the state benefits from the taxation of alcohol in the post prohibition era.
In the end, parking meter rate increases are an annoyance and don’t deal with solving either the real problem of parking or in significantly reducing the deficit. What is needed is a bold action like that stated above to create an entirely new revenue stream that solves many problems at once and reconfigures both the debt and the government’s responsibilities to the people.
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Crafted at POLA
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