Day: February 25, 2010

Don’t Ticket The Hills Folks

Today’s local news cycle featured news about parking ticket discrimination, and protests down at City Hall.  “We were trying to make an accommodation,” explained Dan Lindheim, City Administrator.   Guess this didn’t work out too well.

In Oakland, it’s illegal to park in the wrong direction, or on sidewalks.  We recall discussions at City Council meetings last year regarding narrow streets and whether these laws needed to be relaxed.  What would happen in another hills firestorm, when the emergency vehicles needed to pass by?

At that time, Council members directed parking officials to use their discretion.  Fast forward, and that discretion is seen as a classic and discriminatory hills versus flats divide – not cool at all.  Apparently Montclarions are given warnings while folks who park on narrow streets elsewhere have tickets in hand.  Obviously this needs to be equitable!

So get out an Oakland map and identify narrow streets, now.

P.S.  In honor of this parking ticket ruckus, your faithful blogger was asked to contribute to the City’s coffers today in Montclair.  My sinful, ticketed behavior was neglecting to update the license registration sticker.  Sighs.

Tree Falls Leave Messy Wake

Another tree falls and knocks out power, pretty ho-hum.  During our extended rainy season, these outages happen so frequently that we don’t even report them all.

Yet we hadn’t considered their messy wake, until walking by one of the major falls today.  You can see the scene is still in bad shape, in this image below.

The tree detritus poses no threats to power lines, roads or anything else.  However the evidence is everywhere, weeks later.  We’re not singling out this homeowner because you can discover the same trunks, stumps and/or destroyed properties scattered in the hills.

Now look up from the ground, and you can see more trees that are ready to keel over.  We can envision the next storm and tree fall here, so maybe it’s worth waiting for the “timber…” before doing anything much!