Much Ado About $13

A whole week has passed without anyone voting to revive (and then revoke again) the city’s brush clearance inspection fee, so it looks like the curtain is finally down on this comedy of errors. Time to roll the credits.

Star billing, of course, goes to the Los Angeles Fire Department, which launched the inspection fee fiasco in March by mailing its now infamous notice to residents of the Mountain Fire District and buffer zones. The tersely worded notice failed to explain the fee, but the crowning touch of absurdity was threatening a fine if residents missed the deadline--which expired two days before many of the mailers arrived.

Property owners were not amused. They rightly let the city know they did not appreciate the lack of information and the ham-fisted wording. Some, however, went further and provided the overreaction required to keep the chain of absurdities going. They threatened to sue, labeling the fee an illegal tax. In protest, they may even have helped defeat a police and fire bond issue on the ballot in April.

The City Council spent three months trying to put out the sparks--ordering the fee put on hold, the notice rewritten, the late fee dropped. It’s on, it’s off, it’s on again. Finally council members gave up on the mess, voting unanimously to rescind the controversial fee and return the more than $900,000 already collected. Hard to blame them. Councilman Hal Bernson, in a masterful display of understatement, summed up the decision this way: “Probably under the circumstances, it’s best to start over. They’ve screwed it up so bad.”

True enough, but what a lot of ado about $13. The money that will be spent to refund the fees could have sent the entire Fire Department to charm school--or hired a platoon of brush clearers.

The only good news to come out of this farce is that the inspections somehow got done, despite all the bureaucratic bungling. Fee critics, eager to play the hero, say this means the money was never needed, but all it really means is that the City Council has to find $2 million somewhere else in this year’s budget. It also means the city will have to try again next year to determine which properties fall within hazard areas and buffer zones where brush clearance is urgently needed and then make its case for the fee. In the end there is nothing comical, at all, about fire prevention.