By Michael Jondreau
I’m proud to live in Santa Monica, but it’s certainly not a case of my city, right or wrong. In visiting Mar Vista in past weeks, for instance, I felt uncomfortable, even embarrassed, to hear residents there complain about our close-fisted dog park policy. Now that the (Airport Dog) Park is open to all qualified LA County dogs, the City Council is touting its own big heart — without mentioning the income increase from park fees for the auslander dogs or the grabby policies behind such fees.
Santa Monica is a small city with an enormous commercial and property tax base, yet is relentless in squeezing revenue from resident and visitor — from 2 a.m. parking meters to overpriced pier rides. The city has long been running with the permit parking pack — another income boon (and a practice that a liberal city might have rejected as unfair to the rest of the people in the state who pay for our streets).
And they just keep coming. Recently, I inquired about admission to the Memorial Park skateboard facility only to find that, in order to test to see if my creaky joints could hold the turns, a $15 registration fee was required — no tryout permitted, not even for the per-entry fee of $5.
Yet it remains that despite these medieval revenue structures and despite our tax base, many Santa Monica parents wonder why the city continues to maintain a single overcrowded and often-troubled high school, with kudos to its grade and middle schools, some of the best in the nation.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 20, 2007. Read the original PDF.