The Vintage & Handmade Market You might have heard by now that the city of San Diego isn't exactly awash in loose change. On the whole, San Diegans are doing just fine, but the gubment-it's flat broke. It seems our coffers are so bare we can hardly pay attention, and I haven't figured out precisely why that is. All I can surmise is that City Hall doesn't take in as much money as it shells out, and those of you with a checkbook know that's the quickest way to end up poor.
I'm not a financial advisor. I'm not an economist. I'm not an accountant. I can't even remember how to factor a polynomial, although I think it involves the use of foil, of all things. The point is, I can't look at a set of books as thick as the city's tome of red ink and begin to make heads or tails out of it. Thus, any insight I have to offer is pretty general. That being the case, here goes the generalizing:
If you spend more than you make, you have two choices. You can either a) spend less, or b) make more. Smart people would probably tell you to do both, at least in the short run. However, in the case of San Diego, I'm not sure the first of those choices is very feasible. How much less could we actually afford to spend? We already won't pay our cops, we don't have libraries, we can't underground our utility lines, we can't keep up with our crumbling pipes and other infrastructure and we have turned our children's after-school environment into an asphalt gladiator academy through the stingiest child-welfare move since Ronald Reagan declared ketchup a vegetable. In terms of spending as little as possible, San Diego leads the list of candidates for most miserly major American city. So that leaves Option B-make more money. I don't know about y'all, but were it me and I needed to make more money (word to my editor), I would look around at what I had, asset-wise, and ask myself whether I had employed everything to its fullest benefit. Were I the city of San Diego, I'd do the same, and I would discover instantly that indeed I had not. Take the one thing for which we're best known, the beach. You see, latitudinally situated as we are in a desirable Mediterranean clime, and abutting the edge of a continental shelf as we do, we have mile after mile of beach, and it seems people from all over the world can't wait to go to it. So when I heard in passing the other day that “they” (whoever they are) were considering installing parking meters at the beach, I thought to myself, Well, there's a sensible idea that's only about 25 years late. Personally, I don't really have a dog in this fight. I'll go to the beach when they pave it. But since a whole bunch of people do go to the beach, and since a whole bunch of them drive cars, quite predictably the possibility of charging them to park said cars during their sandy sojourn has got them all whipped up into a communal frenzy.
I heard a frequenter of one city beach on the local news a few nights ago utter what must be the Citizens for Free Beach Parking mantra during one of those man-on-the-street-who's-unqualified-to-opine interviews: “They shouldn't charge us to park at the beach because the beach belongs to all of us.”
As far as I'm concerned, if the beaches belong to all of us, so do the sidewalks, even the sidewalks in my own Hillcrest neighborhood. The sidewalks might not be a natural resource, but they're a public resource. We paid for them. They belong to us. But try finding a spot along a sidewalk in Hillcrest without a parking meter next to it. I'm guessing there are about 7 trillion parking meters in Hillcrest. I'm sure that's a conservative figure, but I don't want to be accused of exaggeration. There's a parking meter in front of every shop, bar, salon and patisserie in the entire zip code. There's a parking meter in front of the House of Clocks and the place is vacant. There's a parking meter in front of Pernicano's and it's been vacant since the Ford administration. There's even a parking meter in front of the mortuary, and if you think the beach is popular, people are dying to get in there. Listen, beach-goers, you do not have an inalienable right to stuff your Hummer into a space designed for a Civic and leave it there all day for free while you frolic in the sun, surf and sand. And listen, people who decide whether or not to indulge beach-goers' Utopian dreams, you need to make more money, so charge people to park at the beach.
I wish every issue that confronts City Hall was as slam dunk as this one. Some things aren't black-and-white. Some are so gray they'd go well with a La Jolla morning. This one, however, is absolutely bold-faced and screams out in 36-point type. Put parking meters at the beach and be done with it. I don't care if it pisses off every half-naked co-ed and white-bellied über-dad in the suburbs. Put some parking meters down there and let the flow of quarters and the $35 checks from violators start filling up the fiscal chasm we've dug. I'm sure all of you from the Coalition for Herbs and Seals or whatever other fiscally imprudent group of the moment has sprung up to combat the surging tide of logic will oppose the installation of parking meters at the beach, and when you need a cop, or want a library, or wish you had plumbing that worked, or want your kids to be safe after school, don't stress. Just load up in the family wagon and cruise on down to the beach where, for now, you can still park for free and forget about all those things you want while the sun gives you cancer.
Write to tony@SDcitybeat.com and editor@SDcitybeat.com.
