December 8, 2007

911 Phone Fees..

Now as many of the readers of the Ojai/Ventura Voice realize I am usually adamantly against any sort of fee increase, tax increase, or any of the myriad ways the Gang in the Ivory Tower (Ventura City Hall), come up with to relieve us of our hard earned cash.

This may shock many folks but I am not only FOR the implementation of the 911 Fee, but I feel that $1.76 per month which will generate around $2.7 million dollars towards the $3.4 million dollars that is the yearly cost to operate the 911 system is not enough. Since the cost of the system is $3.4 million per year we each, (130,000) users would only have to chip in $2.65 cents per month to cover the entire cost. Now that's less than a "White chocolate, Cinnamon based, Vanilla latte at the local coffee hangout. Nobody should, or at least the majority of the folks shouldn't mind chipping in that small amount of money for such a great public safety system. Plus it's only once a month, I'm sure that most folks visit the coffee joint on a daily basis and spend that amount or more.

The main benefit to the 911 Fee is that it would free up $3.4 million dollars per year to allow the Gang in the Ivory Tower to add more police and fire personnel to the cities ranks. I do believe that a provision in the 911 Fee plan should state that all monetary savings would have to be spent on hiring more personnel to the police department or fire department.

Now the Gang in the Ivory Tower says that legally this kind of fee is not considered a tax and does not require a vote of the public, some folks are arguing that it is in reality a tax, I personally think that anytime a government agency takes any money from the public in anyway, for any reason, it definitely is a tax. However in some cases no matter what you call it the charge is well worth it. This is certainly a much better way to generate money for public safety than their much maligned C7 measure that was absolutely a misguided, phoney, spun, tax increase.

Not to despoil my adversarial persona any further, I would also however like to add that the Gang in the Ivory Tower owes it to the citizens of our city to seriously consider "Paid Parking" in our city. The cost of maintaining parking lots/structures, streets, curbs, sidewalks, etc is obviously one of the major drains on our stretched budget. With the correct paid parking plan, as is used in most other cities we could generate a few million dollars per year to go toward that maintenance cost, plus with paid parking some of the cost would be borne by out-of-town visitors. Now that we are entering a new year with some "re-elected" members of the Gang in the Ivory Tower they have a great chance to do some good things for our city rather than sit on their thrones trying to figure out how to raise more taxes.

Rellis Smith
res@venturastuff.com