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Let’s Count the Ways City Hall Fails Us |
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GuestWords
By Ron Kaye (Posted first at RonKayeLA.com )
Even as they were spending the city into a $500 million deficit four months ago, your City Council members came up with yet another bright idea to make your life better and the mayor wholeheartedly agreed: Every cat and dog in L.A. would have to be spayed or neutered, no exceptions without paying heavy penalties.
Of course, talk -- like City Hall's selective enforcement policies -- is cheap. In this case, they were so cheap they provided no funds to enforce this law.
That should surprise no one since the city doesn't even enforce the requirement that every dog must be licensed every year.
Law-abiding citizens clearly are as much a rarity as city politicians who expect the laws they pass to be obeyed.
Back in May, Controller Laura Chick estimated there's only 125,000 law-abiding dog owners and as many as six times that many who are scofflaws -- which made people like my wife feel pretty foolish for obediently licensing Bruno, the beast she rescued from bushes before he killed someone.
In a city so cash-strapped it's imposed charges on just about everything honest people do and seeks to make them pay even more to save the souls of hardened gangsters, it seems like getting their dirty little hands on the $9 million a year lost from not enforcing the pet registration law would be enough motivation.
But no, this is L.A. and as Chick showed in an audit Tuesday absolutely nothing has been done to fund the mandatory spaying and neutering law for cats and dogs and the Animal Services Department has done nothing to educate the public or implement the law when the grace period ends in October.
"Though Animal Services is charged with enforcing the mandatory spay and neuter law, it does not intend to do so," Chick said in her audit statement.
In other words, it's up to you to decide whether you want to obey the law or not -- like just about everything City Hall does to selectively punish the law-abiding while letting the scofflaws do whatever they want.
I suppose some of you NIMBY types and middle-class malcontents have a problem with that. If so, why don't you post other examples of the city's SCOFF LAWS or selective enforcement? (Former Daily News editor, turned activist, Ron Kaye can be reached at:
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CityWatch
Vol 6 Issue 68
Pub: Aug 22, 2008
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