You pay to play in posh San Marino
I’m almost sorry to have to report this news:
The Glendale tree-trimming saga, one of my favorite bureaucratic nightmare stories of all time, has come to a happy close.
After a showdown Monday with the city attorney, there will be no $347,600 fine for Ann and Mike Collard. If you need reminding, they’re the Glendale folks who got told by the Fire Department to trim their trees, so they innocently hired a guy to shave a few oaks and sycamores, only to find themselves crushed under the full force of municipal folly.
More to come on that, but first I’ve got another tale of municipal malarkey, this time in a San Gabriel Valley town.
My 4-year-old is learning to ride her first bicycle, and my lovely and talented wife, Alison, heard that San Marino’s Lacy Park was a sweet plot of land with a flat oval path. The two of them went together a couple of times in the middle of the week, and then I joined them on a Saturday.
So we park the car, we unload the bike, walk toward the entrance and see a toll booth.
On weekends, it turns out, there’s a $4 fee for anyone 5 or older who doesn’t live in the rarefied community of San Marino.
OK, look. I’m there to see my daughter ride a bike, and I don’t want to be a grinch during the holidays.
But $8 to enter a city park that’s only a couple Frisbee tosses long? I’ve certainly paid to enter state and national parks, but never a city park. So it was hard not to get the feeling that the fair city of San Marino didn’t really want me in its park.
Are the locals watching us? I wondered. Have they already sized us up as the kind of riffraff they’d like to keep out?
My daughter took off at a pretty good clip on her bike, and I put the fee business out of my head. But only until I noticed a sign announcing that the Lacy Park irrigation system had been upgraded with state funds.
“Another project to improve California parks funded by the 2000 parks bond,” said the sign, which had Gov. Schwarzenegger’s name on it.
Wait a minute. So technically, I helped pay for San Marino to beautify its park, and they want to charge me yet again to see the improvements?
Is that even legal?
Several days later, when I was talking to Glendale’s city attorney about tree trimming, he told me he was under the impression that a city could charge an entrance fee only if the park was built and maintained entirely with local funds.
It was time to bang on a few doors at San Marino City Hall.
Matt Ballantyne, the city manager, said the nonresident fee started in 1990 because there wasn’t enough money to keep the park open every day. San Marino may be upper crust, he said, but with little in the way of industry or commerce, the city budget is tight.
Councilman Bob Twist said that after Proposition 13 -- which limits property tax rates -- drained funds to cities, San Marino residents approved one tax after another to pay for local services such as public safety and schools. As for Lacy Park, the nonresident fees were seen as a way to keep it open every day for everyone to enjoy.
Councilwoman Betty Brown was aghast when I told her I’d read that the fees had been criticized as a way of keeping out the offspring of nannies and gardeners working in San Marino. But she did say the fence was installed to discourage outsiders.
“In the ‘70s, there were a lot of people coming and smoking pot in the park. It was an unpleasant place because so many people were bringing their kids there.”
Hard to imagine. What kind of lunkhead brings kids to a park?
“It’s a private park belonging to the city, so the city has control over it,” Twist told me.
Huh?
The tight-budget argument may be valid, but every city could make the same case. I told San Marino’s best and brightest that I live in Los Angeles, where there’s never enough money for parks or anything else.
From here on out, I told Brown and San Marino Mayor Matthew Lin, I’m going to set up a booth in Griffith Park and charge everyone from San Marino $4 to enter.
But that’s if I’m in a good mood.
I might charge $8 or $10, depending on how I feel at the time, or whether I think they really belong in my park.
Brown and Lin said they love Griffith Park and would be happy to pay.
You listening, Antonio? Work with me here, and I think I could solve your budget crisis.
When I caught up with San Marino City Atty. Steve Dorsey, he said it wouldn’t be legal to charge non-residents if Lacy Park had received federal funds. But there was a specific clause in the grant of state bond money that allowed San Marino to charge fees to non-residents.
Pardon me, but I don’t like the deal, and we’re not talking about a small sum of state money that was plowed into Lacy Park. Ballantyne tells me it was more than $320,000.
And Patti Keating of the state parks department said Lacy Park has received more than $600,000 in state funds through the years. She was looking into the terms of those grants to see whether San Marino is authorized to charge fees to nonresidents, but said it could take a couple of days to get an answer.
I’ve got nothing but time.
Meanwhile, in Glendale, Mike and Ann Collard have nothing but thanks that city officials have finally come to their senses in the tree-trimming fiasco.
Instead of the $347,600 fine that was imposed for trimming protected native trees, or the $10,000 fine the mayor suggested as a compromise, they’ll pay absolutely nothing. And Glendale’s tree trimming ordinance will be amended to target only those who willfully destroy protected oaks and sycamores, rather than innocent homeowners whose gardeners trim a little too aggressively.
So maybe my work’s done in Glendale. And with luck, San Marino’s fearless leaders will come to their senses.
But in this endless crusade against municipal tomfoolery, there’s no time to stop and gloat. I’m working a hot tip now on what could be yet another tale of bureaucracy crushing the human spirit.
It’s the story of a man who saved up for years, finally bought his dream house in Altadena and nearly lost everything because of a fence post that was too close to an oak tree.
So stay tuned.
And please keep these tips coming, folks.
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