Is this the sign the city is going to put up outside your house?
Almost 20 neighbors showed up to our house last Sunday to discuss issues on the block. Aside from the rising crime: burglaries, car break-ins and a attempted mugging, there was a lot of talk about the increased parking tickets.
At $80 a pop, a parking ticket is not a small thing. $80 could easily be a day’s pay. And $80 is also a large little sum of taxation.
As revenue in the city of Oakland has declined, as the rich have been kissed up to so badly that they no longer fear being taxed, then the city has been looking for other ways to raise money. Last July the Parking Enforcement department hired a shift of workers to spend all night scouring neighborhoods to ticket people outside their homes. Things like parking 2-inches onto a red curb or parking in the wrong direction.
On Wednesday, for instance, two people on our block got tickets at 1AM. One should’ve been a fix-it ticket, but instead got a near $100 fine. This new form of taxation is extremely irritating for workers, but it gets worse.
It has just come out in the newspapers that Oakland parking officers were ordered to avoid enforcing neighborhood parking violations in two of the city's wealthier neighborhoods but told to continue enforcing the same violations in poorer neighborhoods. Parking violators in the richer neighborhoods were to receive "courtesy notices," according to a July 24 memo by Ronald Abernathy, a senior parking enforcement supervisor. The letter did not explain why the two neighborhoods were being spared from the tickets, which carry fines ranging from $40 to $100.
Who exposed this crime? Not the new workers on the night shift who are considered temporary employees, but the unionized day workers who have a contract that means they can’t get fired for whistle blowing.
So there you have it. A memo got out proving that the rich are treated better than everyone else and confirming that the rich, or the affluent in this case, will just not allow themselves to be taxed.
Our block is sending a complaint to the local councilor and demanding a meeting with her about it. Even before the San Francisco Chronicle broke the story about the memo favoring the rich, one person at the block meeting complained that they probably were hitting poorer neighborhoods harder with the “parking enforcement.”
Well, it’s true, one law for the rich and one for the rest of us.
We need a successful referendum like the one pushed by the Oregon teachers’ union that forces the rich to pay taxes.
If capitalism gets away with it, there WILL be a meter standing outside your home one day.
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