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So, there are these things called Business Improvement Districts.
Originally, they were organizations of property owners in marginal commercial districts who got together to do things like clean dog shit off the street, sift needles out of sand boxes and scrub over tags on the sides of abandoned warehouses.
The jargon: private sector creativity applied towards the solution of public problems!
The reality: Jesus, there must be something we can do to bring our property values up.
In recent years, Business Improvement Districts have become something of a boom industry for little bands of wonk policy consultants who put the proposals together, shepherd them through small town city councils and then collect the management fees. They no longer target property owners. Now they target business owners (most of whom rent their business premises at inflated prices from fat cat property owners.) In these days of state and county budget crises, they are also a way for beleaguered local officials to shift the cost of maintaining certain services – beautification, street cleaning – away from the public moneybags and into the cash registers of small merchants. Business Improvement Districts are subsidized, you see, through a surcharge on business licenses – in other words, a tax, applied discriminatorily to small businesses. Note that the property owners themselves are no longer the deep pockets.
So, when a couple of months ago, a young woman who looked like a Moonie breezed into the store and handed me a survey, I was not pleased. "We’d like to clean Cannery Row up!" she babbled.
"What a great idea!" I said. I walked her out to the corner of Cannery Row and Prescott. "Let’s see. From this spot here, I can count one, two, three…fourteen, fifteen, sixteen – sixteen trash receptacles! How many garbage cans do you think Cannery Row really needs?"
So last night the resolution to establish a Cannery Row Business Improvement District went up before the Monterey City Council. I was the only protester there. The wonks with the dollar signs in their eyes, something called The Pease Partnership, gave a really badly prepared Power Point presentation. "The majority of businesses support the resolution," the dour matriarch who heads the consulting group told the assemblage.
But this was simply a lie.
When it was my turn to speak, I pointed that out. "Sixty-four businesses or 46% of the sample did not turn the survey in. One might argue that this is, in fact, a de facto vote against the proposal, particularly when you add that number to the 23 businesses who gave the proposal an unequivocal ‘no’."
Shoulda saved my breath.
The resolution was a fait accomplis going in and everybody knew it, the Moonie girl sitting on the wooden bench in front of me, her mother-in-law – doyenne of the Pease Partnership – the petty bureaucrats who’d managed to scrounge 200 votes from an apathetic electorate and so get elected to the city council of this miserable town.
I could never be a politician. I get way too worked up over this sort of thing. My hands start to shake.
It took me two dishes of chocolate mud pie ice cream, the National Enquirer and a full hour of Bravo’s new reality series about life in a hair salon before I started feeling normal again.
Around midnight, Ben and Robin wandered back from their last night with Carson & Barnes. There’d been twenty or so animal rights protestors, and Robin – who’d been put to work in the petting zoo – took them on with his chatterbox power. The head protestor, a luscious blonde looking for TV coverage, was particularly strident in her denunciations. She thought Robin lived and traveled with the circus. "They’re abusing you," she cried, "just like they’re abusing the elephants!"
Trust Robin to flow with the fantasy.
"They pay me fifty dollars a week," he said. "Now I spend it on video games. But when I’m a little older, I’ll start buying drugs."
"You’re a brat!" screamed the protestor.
I wish I’d been there instead of playing Joan of Arc at the City Council.
Originally, they were organizations of property owners in marginal commercial districts who got together to do things like clean dog shit off the street, sift needles out of sand boxes and scrub over tags on the sides of abandoned warehouses.
The jargon: private sector creativity applied towards the solution of public problems!
The reality: Jesus, there must be something we can do to bring our property values up.
In recent years, Business Improvement Districts have become something of a boom industry for little bands of wonk policy consultants who put the proposals together, shepherd them through small town city councils and then collect the management fees. They no longer target property owners. Now they target business owners (most of whom rent their business premises at inflated prices from fat cat property owners.) In these days of state and county budget crises, they are also a way for beleaguered local officials to shift the cost of maintaining certain services – beautification, street cleaning – away from the public moneybags and into the cash registers of small merchants. Business Improvement Districts are subsidized, you see, through a surcharge on business licenses – in other words, a tax, applied discriminatorily to small businesses. Note that the property owners themselves are no longer the deep pockets.
So, when a couple of months ago, a young woman who looked like a Moonie breezed into the store and handed me a survey, I was not pleased. "We’d like to clean Cannery Row up!" she babbled.
"What a great idea!" I said. I walked her out to the corner of Cannery Row and Prescott. "Let’s see. From this spot here, I can count one, two, three…fourteen, fifteen, sixteen – sixteen trash receptacles! How many garbage cans do you think Cannery Row really needs?"
So last night the resolution to establish a Cannery Row Business Improvement District went up before the Monterey City Council. I was the only protester there. The wonks with the dollar signs in their eyes, something called The Pease Partnership, gave a really badly prepared Power Point presentation. "The majority of businesses support the resolution," the dour matriarch who heads the consulting group told the assemblage.
But this was simply a lie.
When it was my turn to speak, I pointed that out. "Sixty-four businesses or 46% of the sample did not turn the survey in. One might argue that this is, in fact, a de facto vote against the proposal, particularly when you add that number to the 23 businesses who gave the proposal an unequivocal ‘no’."
Shoulda saved my breath.
The resolution was a fait accomplis going in and everybody knew it, the Moonie girl sitting on the wooden bench in front of me, her mother-in-law – doyenne of the Pease Partnership – the petty bureaucrats who’d managed to scrounge 200 votes from an apathetic electorate and so get elected to the city council of this miserable town.
I could never be a politician. I get way too worked up over this sort of thing. My hands start to shake.
It took me two dishes of chocolate mud pie ice cream, the National Enquirer and a full hour of Bravo’s new reality series about life in a hair salon before I started feeling normal again.
Around midnight, Ben and Robin wandered back from their last night with Carson & Barnes. There’d been twenty or so animal rights protestors, and Robin – who’d been put to work in the petting zoo – took them on with his chatterbox power. The head protestor, a luscious blonde looking for TV coverage, was particularly strident in her denunciations. She thought Robin lived and traveled with the circus. "They’re abusing you," she cried, "just like they’re abusing the elephants!"
Trust Robin to flow with the fantasy.
"They pay me fifty dollars a week," he said. "Now I spend it on video games. But when I’m a little older, I’ll start buying drugs."
"You’re a brat!" screamed the protestor.
I wish I’d been there instead of playing Joan of Arc at the City Council.
