HAS KATRINA FOLEY SEEN THE LIGHT?
City Councilperson Katrina Foley gave the following New Year's resolution to the OC REGISTER
(page Local 5, 1/1/07):
"My resolution for the city for 2007 is to work toward making Costa Mesa surpass Huntington Beach as the No. 1 city for raising a family. We'd be number one in public safety, education, quality of life and community parks and trails. If you can be number one for raising a family, you'd be number one for anybody wanting to live here."
Now, those are sentiments that most improvement minded citizens would agree with and we truly hope that Ms. Foley means it and works to help improve our city.
Unfortunately, Ms. Foley often seems to say one thing and do another. Readers will remember how she said things about protecting our border and then refused to sign a letter that all four other City Councilmembers signed asking President Bush to do just that. At the time, Foley said she'd send her own letter with more details than the one the Council sent. As far as we know, Ms. Foley has never sent such a letter.
It's not that Ms. Foley and her liberal pals want to screw up Costa Mesa and turn it into a slum city--who would want that?--but, it seems to us that Ms.Foley and her friends have some incorrect mind sets that causes them to be blind as to what is needed to fix our city.
Our guess is that when Ms. Foley says what she says above, that what she really means is that she wants more charities and more Midnight Basketball type programs instead of real improvement. (See following article).
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AS YE SOW, SO SHALL YE REAP
Costa Mesa has seen an increase in gangs and killings and the number of failing schools and other social problems. Why?
The answer is because a liberal establishment in this city has done just about all the wrong things. Instead of making our city nicer, they've made it worse. And, they've been doing the wrong things for at least two decades.
Who should be blamed for the recent killings in our city and our failing schools and all the rest of the social problems we have? Forget the glib PC answers. You've heard them a thousand times, and mostly they're shallow and incomplete answers.
The deeper answer about who is responsible--or at least who shares the responsibility--for the way Costa Mesa is today, is that it is those who have made our city a sanctuary city for a criminal element. They have sown weeds and now they want to maintain weeds.
Let's step back for a moment. Many events in our world are broadly predictable. One may not know exactly who will be killed in gang killings or when they will occur. However, with a high degree of probability, one can "guess" that such things will happen in downscale areas where people are stuffed into barracks style apartments [And, in Costa Mesa's case they're stuffed there for those who benefit from having a low wage underclass conveniently at hand].
If you are responsible for the downscale conditions, then you are at least partly responsible for the crime and other problems that grow from those conditions.
Yes, the seeds of our problems in Costa Mesa were planted years ago and they're now bearing their evil fruit in all the negative things we see in our city. And, what are these seeds? Some of them are the aforementioned downscale, functionally obsolete, barracks style apartments in our city that are like sardine cans for people.
They are the breeding grounds of many of our problems.
So, what do the liberals want to do to solve the problems that they caused? They want to spend more of your money on social programs and on some cosmetic improvements to the slums. Neither of these will work
What's the real answer? Thin out the slums. We've written it many times before. The City of Costa Mesa should use part of its huge revenues to start buying up and removing slum buildings. Then, the City can assemble the parcels it has bought and turn them into parks and sports fields, or it can sell the land to developers for senior housing or pride of ownership homes.
Another way of looking at this suggestion comes to us from the corporate world.
When a company starts up, it often raises money by selling stock in the company. This makes the stockholders part owners of the company. It also gives up some control by those who founded the company.
What often happens is that if a company becomes very successful, the founders will start buying up the outstanding stock so that they regain control of the company.
In our situation in Costa Mesa, the City (that means all of us), owns some land in the city. Parks, City buildings, etc., and other land is owned by private parties and others.
Why not have the City of Costa Mesa, which is mostly built out and which is financially successful, follow the lead of the corporate world and start buying back some properties as we've suggested above?
Isn't it time we got control of our future in this City? Why should we continue to be victimized by slum lords, out of town industrialists, illegal aliens, criminals, charity bosses and neurotic libs?
Isn't it time that we boldly moved to take back our city for the good, decent middle class citizens who are the backbone of this city?
Isn't it time we said that we've had enough phony programs that only appease a criminal element and which are leading us ever downwards?
Isn't it time we said that it's time to stop doing stupid things such as paying $ 40,000 per year to pick up shopping carts abandoned on our streets? That's not our responsibility. Arrest those who steal them and/or make the merchants pay for this. And, this is just one of the appeasement programs that we're paying for. We say, take that money and use it as a down payment on slum buildings and then tear them down.
Isn't it time we stopped funding goofy Midnight Basketball programs instead of thinning out the slums?
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Those are our opinions. Thanks for reading them.
