Come with me back in time a decade ago and listen to the story of San Fernando Valley secession and what we learned about the rights of the people who pay the bills.
Quite siimply, we learned that all the streets and sidewalks, all the sewers, water lines, power poles and lines, all the the municipal buildings, all the parks, everything that a private individual or business doesn’t hold the deed to belongs to the legal fiction known as the City of Los Angeles, Inc.
None of it belongs in any sense to the people, the people who create the government to serve them — of, by and for them — and who pay the taxes, fees and rates that paid for the city and support it with their money. So when breakup was the issue, we were told the Valley as a city — the nation’s sixth largest, richest, safest and most intergrated big city — owned nothing.
Everything public would belong to the City of L.A. even though it was not in L.A. but in the wannabe City of the San Fernando Valley.
Now it’s 2008, and the city can’t afford to maintain its property except for coming up with $300 million to turn City Hall into a palace of gold and marble and $500 milion to build a new police station to beautify downtown for skyscraper developers.
The property issue of the moment is sidewalks. The city ended its policy of fixing sidewalks just about the time the official policy of City Hall became giving every dollar available to pad the salaries of city employees’ paychecks and grease the palms of developers and contractors.
The result is a 75-year backlog of broken and crumbling sidewalks that are hazardous to your health and lead to numerous claims and lawsuits.
Enter Assemblywoman Audra Strickland, a Republican from Westlake Village where the sidewalks and streets are in perfect condition She has proposed AB 1985 that would “hold the owner of the property on which the sidewalk is located liable for the repair and maintenance of the sidewalk.”
Those are the words of L.A.’s Chief Legislative Analyst Gerry Miller and his assistant Roslyn Carter Phillips who last week sounded the alarm that City Hall’s right to ownership without responsibility was under siege.
As adviser to the City Council, the CLA urged the council to oppose
Strickland’s bill which would authorize the city’s lobbying team to
spend L.A.’s political capital fighting a measure that would make life
better and safer for the people — goals that are never part of L.A.’s
political agenda.
Under current law, owners of property fronting
on public sidwalks are legally responsible for their maintenance but
the city has to notify them of the need to make repairs and the repairs have to start within two
weeks. The caveat is that city also has to borrow the money to pay for the repairs and
then impose an assessment to recoup its costs.
Of course, City
Hall doesn’t do any of that because that would require the council to
actually make a decision and risk the wrath of the people. So without a
policy, there’s broken sidewalks.
What Strickland wants to do is
to make government responsible for maintaining its property, which
according to the CLA’s memo would be “extremely costly.”
Police Chief Bill Bratton believes in the “broken wiindow” theory of crime which holds that broken windows, abandoned buildings and other signs of deterioration create a climate in which criminal behavior flourishes.
So here’s the “broken sidewalk” theory: When government fails to live up to its basic responsibilities to the people and the people feel they have no ownership stake in their government, the result is what’s happened in L.A. The public is apathetic and alienated, the city deteriorates, the middle class flees or is chased out of town and you wind up with a city of rich living in privately-guarded enclaves of McMansions and the masses living in gang-infested slums.
Oh yeah, and the government itself merrily goes along with its huge salaries and amazing array of perks and benefits.
Ron, I’m going to leave a lot more than just trash on the sidewalk outside City Hall on Bastille Day.
As for Ms. Strickland, when is she up for election again?
Spiffy raises as valid point: if the sidewalk becomes the responsibility of the homeowner, and the homeowner is liable for injuries of pedestrians, can’t they argue that they can do whatever they want with that space as “private property,” or just place a fence around it and force pedestrians into the street around it?
Normally, it’s Democrats who propose legislation that forces financial burdens on invididuals property owners and companies, coming from a Republican, this is just odd. Fodder for radical Democrats to say they’re greedy and “against the people.”
I’d like to see more enforcement of making builders of homes and projects especially on older or substandard streets, pay to repave them. A number of huge private home and retaining walls have gone up on my streets, with years of giant trucks and dozens and dozens of smaller ones, significantly contributing to the wear and tear of a sloping street that hasn’t been paved in at least 40 years — pieces of the edge have falled off, even into private property, and could have given way under cars. None of these builders ever did a thing to repave the street. I’m sure they’re not docked for the street repair fund, either, but they SHOULD be. I talked to one builder who argued that he shouldn’t have to make up for many others who’ve gone before, so it goes/
Wendy Greuel has some sort of half-and- half program between city and homeowners. Do you know the details? Does that split liability, too? Is it legal to force the homeowner to pay for all repair and yet keep it a pubic sidewalk, absorbing liabilities?
Are there other cities where sidewalks are the responsibiity of homeowners? I’ve heard from friends in Santa Monica that there are obligations re: sidewalks when they sell a house?
Oh I LOVE this bill! I can so so much creativity springing forth from each of us being responsible for the sidewalks in front of our properties.
I’m inspired to tear up the cement, lay down brick, and then paint each brick a different color. Wouldn’t the be pretty?
Better yet, heck with cement—I’ll just dig up the cement and leave DIRT in front of my someday Valley home—a dirt pathway which I can surround with every manner of flora and fauna. It can be my ode to the rainfoirest, right in front of my own piece of Valley real estate. Trees and flowers 12 feet high will look great.
Oh I LOVE this bill. May it pass, for the sake of beauty for us all and to relieve the gov’t of this burden.
We don’t need safe walking space for all to enjoy and benefit from. We need more individuality!
I think the 2 commenters above missed the point. Strickland’s bill will make the city that owns the sidewalk responsible for its repair. Right now, you the homeowner, are responsible for the sidewalk in front of your home even though you don’t own it. Here in Thousand Oaks they have fined people large sums of money when they don’t follow the governments order to fix the sidewalks.
You’re the one who’s Missing the Point: the bill would hold the homeowner liable for repair and maintenance of the sidewalk — apparently since it’s not a big problem in HER area, she’s willing to stick older parts of town with the bill. That’s how Joe Mailander in his blog street-hassle reads it, too, as does everyone else. I think you’re Off. (Ron’s analysis isn’t very clear here, admittedly — he seems to be approving of Audra, while disapproving the message.)
Take a minute to read the post closely. Both Ron’s post and the proposed bill are pretty clear to me. The owner of the sidewalks much pay to fix them. The city of L.A. owns the sidewalks. It can either fix them or deed them to the property owners. It’s pretty simple people.
Sidewalks do not “wear out”, rather, they crack due to stress caused primarily by tree roots. Hence, issue is, who planted the offending tree? If City on City-owned parkway, City should be responsible for repair even if general rule would be to require homeowner to maintain. Otherwise, howmeowner could repair, City could destroy and suffer no consequences.
Secondly, law requiring person to repair what he does not own and cannot control may be unconstitutional taking without compensation. Why limit responsibility to sidewalks in front of your property, why not the entire block?
No matter what the issue is, when looking at solutions, we come back to the same list of options. Secession, recall, financially contribute to community activists running for office, but most clearly forcing Los Angeles to relinquish ownership over what they fail to maintain. Clearing the path for secession. Sidewalk repairs is not a stumbling block for all our sister cities. It’s a symptom, however, of our leaders inability to find solutions that are practical. Simply by buying in volume at a great savings, our cement sidewalks can be replaced by interlocking pavers, that can be easily maintained, never need replacing, allow our water tables to fill, looks appealing, and the pesty roots can easily be cut back and sidewalks restored by homeowners with little effort. Recycle the old cement and use it to repair our old city streets.