Opinion: Dig We Must -- Mustn’t We?

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The official orangey-red and white signs went up along my Los Angeles street last week. There would be no street parking today, Tuesday, or tomorrow, Wednesday, so the city could do ... something.

There were a couple of numbers posted to call. One number told you where to call to collect your car from impound if it got towed. Lovely. The second was a Department of Transportation parking info number. It turned out to be a recording saying that if I were asking about a movie shoot in my neighborhood, I should call a different number. If it wasn’t about a movie shoot, please leave a message. I did: What was this about? I wanted to know. Along a lot of streets in my hilly neighborhood, many people don’t have garages. What were our options? Nobody called back.

Councilman Jose Huizar’s office did call me back. A field deputy said she couldn’t get any answer from DoT either, which reassured me in a ``we’re-all-in-this-mess-together’’ way. On the second call, she told me the city was working on the sewers and would be taking up a manhole cover. She asked where the nearest manhole cover to my house is. Turns out it’s two or three houses away.

So she kindly offered to let me park on the street as usual. But that didn’t deal with the real issue here. Two whole blocks around that manhole cover had to be declared off-limits and tow-away for two whole days?

What if people were on vacation? I asked. It’s summer, after all. What if they were off on business? Imagine coming back and finding your car had been towed out of a temporary no-parking spot that sprang up in front of your own house while you were away -- and you have to pay hundreds, maybe thousands in impound fees to get your car back?

The field deputy told me the city is legally obligated to give only 72 hours’ notice for parking restrictions to such projects.

Hold it right there, I thought. This was not, so far as we knew, a sewer emergency. The city hadn’t gone ahead and green-lighted this just a week earlier. [I guess we were lucky to get five or six days’ notice].

It takes weeks, maybe months to get these projects approved -- but residents are entitled to only 72 hours’ no-parking notice? Something’s amiss here. This is the civil version of the ‘’broken-windows’’ theory. If cities can’t mesh with citizens and get their trust on small matters, how can it expect them to get aboard on big matters, like voting for taxes for one thing and making sure they don’t get spent on something else?

Oops -- look at the time. Gotta go move my car, quick.