Encinitas Spending

Local residents who resent paying 7.75% sales tax on a bag of cookies, a 5-pack of Bic shavers, or a 42-ounce box of Tide might be interested to learn how the City of Encinitas uses their sales tax allocation.

Not wisely. To begin with, only seven of California’s 58 counties have a higher sales tax than San Diego County. The official tax rate set by the state legislature is 7.25%. In this country voters approved a 0.5% override for a period of 20 years.

Obviously a lot of voters supported Proposition A as it promised to “relieve traffic congestion, increase safety and improve air quality by providing essential . . . improvements.”

What is the city doing with its share of our sales tax? First of all, they don’t get as much as they had hoped since their Draconian ordinances and lousy permit process have driven so many businesses out of town or into bankruptcy court.

A good share of what does come in gets frittered away to satisfy the administration’s well-known tendency toward king-making-through-public works. This year, for instance, over half a million dollars has been earmarked to construct sidewalks on several rural roads, including the infamous, rutted pile of dirt, Rainbow Ridge--which is about as logical as a ski lift in the Sahara.

The City Council, having learned by now to expect litigation if they just show up for a meeting, attempts to manipulate Proposition A’s legal definitions by incorporating these sidewalks under a “safe route to school” scheme.

You can call sauerkraut sweet, you can call the sun the moon, you can call Dan Quayle a bleeding-heart liberal and you can call Arnold Schwarzenegger a girl, but that don’t make it so. You can call this money-squandering public works scheme a “safety” measure, but that don’t make it so, or safe, or legal, or moral.

If people in the neighborhoods really think sidewalks are the way to go, let us fund them through an assessment district. The city would then learn what the 53,000 of us have always known, that the citizens of Encinitas want curbs, gutters and sidewalks the way we want a visit from Hurricane Hugo.

GEORGE and CAROL LAW, Leucadia