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August 9, 2009

Too Many Parks

Dear Correspondents:

A few times before, I’m written that Matthew Yglesias strikes me as being almost always wrong and badly informed when he blogs about Washington. Now he has outdone himself, and even his regular readers have expressed almost complete bewilderment over his opinion. In http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/08/how-many-parks-do-you-need.php, he says that DC has too many small pocket parks and that small urban parks serve no important purpose, so that there’s no reason to preserve more green space that could be turned into productive apartment buildings or office buildings. This is consistent with Yglesias’ opinions that DC’s height restriction on buildings should be lifted so that we could become a city of skyscrapers and that public policy should discourage the private ownership of automobiles so that more people would have to use public transit and bicycles for their transportation needs. Basically, Yglesias doesn’t understand why cities shouldn’t be built primarily to satisfy the needs of twenty-something singles like him — more bars, clubs, and coffee shops, and less of everything else — and he thinks that nobody else’s preferences are as legitimate as his. But as his commentators have tried to point out to him, cities have to satisfy the needs of many different people, including parents with small children who play in parks, people with pets who run and play in parks, and old people who socialize in parks. For them, the greatest good does not come with the greatest density, and land “wasted” on parks is already being put to a valuable use.

Speaking of small pocket parks, Bruce DePuyt of NewsChannel 8 and WJLA freports that there’s no appetite among members of the city council for renaming the park at 14th and Girard Street, NW, after President Obama. “Contributing to their reluctance is the President’s apparent failure to use any of his clout on issues District residents hold dear,” writes DePuyt.

Ralph Chittams, below, writes that canceling the tax-free back-to-school shopping week probably costs DC tax revenues. In the long run, the increase of DC’s sales tax to 6 percent will probably decrease tax revenues, too. Why should suburbanites, or even DC residents, do major shopping in the District, when every big store has branches in Maryland and Virginia that will charge less, and will pack your purchase in paper or plastic bags without an extra charge imposed by the government? It isn’t smart to make the city even less competitive when the suburbs are ready and willing to serve shoppers better and at a lower cost.

Issues are getting shorter as the weather gets hotter. Help us beef up the next issue of themail; tell us about your life in DC.

Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com

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Penny Wise and Pound Foolish
Ralph J. Chittams, Sr., rjchittamssr@gmail.com

This past weekend was the Tax-Free shopping weekend in Virginia. Granted my observations are unscientific, but there were many cars with DC tags at the malls in Leesburg. What our District officials seem to forget is that, even though they may lose the tax revenue on back-to-school supplies and clothes, those shopping will also purchase other items. Without giving specifics, I’m sure I paid $50 in sales tax to the Commonwealth of Virginia. Most of the items purchased could have been purchased in the District, but I was shopping in Virginia. DC, better luck next year.

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Fire Drills in Apartment Houses?
Jeff Norman, jeffreynorman@comcast.net

There was a recent article in the Post about possibly requiring annual fire drills in private apartment buildings. Isn’t this overkill? Is there any city in the entire world that requires such fire drills in residential apartments? In my building, each rental apartment has a smoke detector and a fire extinguisher, plus there is another fire extinguisher in the hallway of each floor. Periodically we get notices from the Fire Department or Emergency Services reminding us about basic fire safety rules and to have an evacuation plan ready if one is needed. Isn’t that enough? Evacuation is not necessarily the best thing to do in all fires. If there is smoke and fire in the hallway, the residents may be better off closing their doors to keep the fire from spreading into their apartments and wait for help to arrive.

I am even more concerned about how this would be enforced. Is the Fire Department going to hire lots of additional staff to monitor all these fire drills in all of the hundreds of apartment buildings in DC (even if each building has only one fire drill per year) or will they rely on building management, as in the case of office buildings? If so, the building management would have to check each apartment to make sure that all the inhabitants had actually left. If any of them were not careful to re-lock the doors, there could be numerous burglaries. Not only that, such entry could be a violation of the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. Generally, the courts have applied that right more strictly to people’s homes than to their offices. A fire is an emergency, but a drill is not. It might be hard to convince the courts that residents’ Fourth Amendment rights can be waived to conduct drills that have never been deemed necessary since the city was founded in 1800.

[The article is a notice of a hearing on the Fire Alarm Notice and Tenant Fire Safety Amendment Act of 2009, Bill 18-178, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/17/AR2009061701542.html — Gary Imhoff]

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Capital PC User Group Meetings
Phil Shapiro, pshapiro@his.com

Some of the most interesting technology-related meetings and events I’ve attended have been run by people in the Capital PC User Group. You can now stay in the loop on these on Twitter. Follow CPCUG on Twitter at http://twitter.com/cpcug

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Public Transportation
Harold Goldstein, mdbiker@goldray.com

James Treworgy writes [themail, August 5]: “This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t intelligently plan for growth in some areas, but if the potential use of a new metro station is too low then the benefits would not outweigh the cost.” He seems to equate public transportation with Metro. That’s wrong; around the world public transportation can mean anything from jitneys to small buses to trolleys. You use what is appropriate. There is no reason that some form of public transportation cannot be available to every residence in the city and near suburbs.

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