Why does the government make such a target rich environment? Yesterday I was perusing my favorite news aggregator, parknews.biz, and I found a link that read:
“Blue curb parking for disabled still lacking one year into new program”
Was it clickbait? Surely there was a reason for this. The disabled always take the lead in new programs, don’t they? The Story was in the LA Times.
Early last year the city of the angels passed an ordinance that allowed disabled drivers to apply to have a disabled ‘blue curb’ painted in front of their homes This seems like a reasonable program and upwards of 500 citizens have applied for the program and been approved.
Here is the reason for the story. How many curbs do you think have actually been painted in the year the program began? 50, 100, dare we say 500? Nope. The total number is zero. Zip, Nada. Not one curb has been painted.
Why? Enquiring minds want to know. An audit by the city cited:
…ineffective collaborations between the city Department on Disability, the Department of Transportation, the Bureau of Street Services and the Bureau of Engineering as the primary reason for the delay. The audit recommends handing administration of the program to the Department of Transportation, with the Department on Disability continuing to provide technical advice.
Somewhere in the cobwebbed basement of city hall is a “guy.” He’s the one that schedules where the curb painters go to work today. My guess is that if someone told him to schedule the blue curb painting in areas where his crews were working painting other curbs (red, yellow, white, etc), the entire disabled job could be completed in a month.
But then of course what would the bureaucrats at the department of this and the bureau of that have to do?
I mentioned this story to a friend of mine and he noted that the money allocated for the painting had already been spent by the Department of Transportation, the Bureau of Street Services, the Bureau of Engineering and the Department on Disability. So there was nothing left to buy the blue paint.
Maybe the fee charged the disabled when they applied for their curb painting could be used for the paint. Wait…I’m sure that has been spent by the department of blue curb painting approvals.
(A disabled friend of mine decided to take it upon herself a few years ago and she and her roomate went to Home Depot and bought some blue paint and painted the curb in front of their apartment themselves. You gotta know how long it took the city to turn up and paint over the curb. Yep — the next day.)
JVH
