What a surprise! Ventura city officials found a way to try to block a grassroots-driven initiative to removing downtown parking meters--through the courts.

Opponents to the meters tried to get the city to impose a moratorium on the meters. They gathered 10,000 signatures to qualify it for the ballot. Now, even if a hundred thousand Ventura residents vote for the initiative, it won't matter. The parking meters will stay, if City Attorney Ariel Calonne is correct that courts have ruled that the power to remove parking meters is controlled exclusively by the City Council.

The lesson here is that governments--whether they are cities, counties, states, or countries--don't really care about being responsive to the people's wishes. If the people want something the government doesn't want, the government will find a way to thwart their wishes. We saw it with Prop 187. We saw it with Prop 8. We're seeing it locally with these parking meters.

The system is rigged against the citizen, making meaningful reform difficult, if not possible.

Email is a wonderful tool to use to sound off to your elected representatives. Almost all public officials can be contacted in this method, and almost all of their email addresses can easily be found online, providing unprecedented access to public officials.

Obviously, the President of the United States isn't as likely to return an email as a councilperson or a mayor, but when a public official takes the time to read an email, it's more likely to register with them if it contains reasoned, cogent arguments in lieu of rants and profanity.

The angrier a message is, the more it risks being dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic. The problem is that it is so easy to dispatch an email in anger that people often don't take the time to think about what they've written.

Now, I've often said that anger is the most useful emotion. Sadness rarely inspires people to take action to fix problems; despair is an internal emotion. Fear can get you to take action, but in a defensive way. Anger is the most productive--it spurs you to act.

However, uncontrolled anger is counterproductive. It's the equivalent of a wildfire--it has no direction and it harms everything in its path. Harnessed fire, like harnessed anger, can be extremely productive. It can power homes, automobiles, and cities.

Therefore, if a citizen wants a productive exchange with politicians after they do something upsetting, as they often do, harnessed anger should be expressed to them, not irrational, wild anger.

When popular talk-radio hosts John and Ken criticized Mayor Bill Fulton of Ventura for 20 minutes last week over concerns that the city's parking meters are hurting businesses, they gave out his email address several times and posted it on their website. Consequently, Mayor Fulton received about 25 emails (admittedly, that was lighter than I thought it was going to be), some of which were profane.

How productive does the sender of a profane email think it's going to be?

One email read, "Why don't you get a f___ing clue?" (I've removed some letters for obvious reasons).

Do you think Mayor Fulton will run out and try to "get a clue"? Do you think he'll spend more than one second thinking about the email? No, he'll dismiss the author as someone who is upset at the world and taking it out on him, as most people would. [continue reading]

Yesterday, popular talk-radio hosts John and Ken slammed Mayor Bill Fulton and the City Council for installing parking meters in downtown Ventura.

A downtown store owner who says his business is being ruined by the meters was interviewed by the duo, who specifically targeted Fulton because he is a devotee of Donald Shoup, the "prophet of parking." Shoup advocates that automobile use should be discouraged through "smart growth" urban planning policies--for example, penalizing drivers with parking fees.

It seems Fulton may not be alone in Ventura. In 2007, City Manager Rick Cole wrote a blog that said Shoup gave a presentation to city officials. The next day, the City Council approved parking meters downtown.

Cole described the benefits of Shoup's parking fee idea, but nowhere in his post does it describe the (what should have been obvious) impact on local businesses. Here is the full post:

It's been tried before. Has the time come again for parking meters in Downtown Ventura?

That's the plan adopted by the City Council when it approved the Downtown Specific Plan earlier this year. Last night, UCLA Professor Don Shoup presented his findings on the advantages of paid parking at Ventura City Hall.

Shoup, the author of "The High Cost of Free Parking," has earned renown as "a parking rock star," according to the Wall Street Journal. "Cars are parked 95% of the time, but 95% of the academic research studies when they are moving," he told the Ventura audience last night. As a result of his research into this neglected realm of transportation policy, Shoup says charging for street parking will:

Shoup advocates pricing at a price high enough to ensure that there is always at least one space open on each side of a block. That eliminates the circling of the block that research shows averages about three minutes per car over the course of the day (eight minutes during peak parking usage.) While that may seem like a small improvement, Shoup's study of Westwood showed that 45% of the cars during peak hour traffic had already arrived and were looking for a convenient place to park. Over the course of a year, that consumed a million miles of excess vehicle travel, which is the distance of four trips to the moon.

Shoup detailed case studies in Redwood City and Pasadena where paid parking strategies have been successfully implemented. Pasadena, for example, now generates more than a million dollars of paid parking revenue per year to fund added public services in their downtown.

Shoup concluded that cities face a choice. Which would you rather have -- a million miles a year of wasted travel or a million dollars a year to improve Downtown?

If you're a politician in California the last thing you want is to be mentioned on The John and Ken Show, let alone have them dedicate a full segment to you.

Yet that's what happened to Ventura Mayor Bill Fulton Thursday afternoon, when the outspoken hosts--infamous for their anti-incumbent "heads on a stick" campaign--spent twenty minutes lambasting him for hurting downtown businesses with the installation of parking meters.

John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, who daily reach a million listeners on KFI (AM 640), said they were angered after reading a Ventura County Star article about the emotional meeting between businesses owners and city officials over the unpopular parking meters in front of their stores.

The article quoted Gary Parker, a Tea Party activist who owns American Flags and Cutlery, as saying, "I'm telling you, if my business goes down, I am going to dedicate my retirement to bringing those (meters) down."

A producer contacted Parker, and shortly after 2 p.m. he was speaking to John and Ken on the air about the mayor, who Kobylt called "Mayor full-of-it Fulton."

Fulton caught the attention of John and Ken over the weekend, when he was quoted in a Los Angeles Times profile of UCLA professor Donald Shoup, the "prophet of parking."

 "It's really remarkable how he has become the godfather of this parking idea," said Ventura Mayor Bill Fulton, who as a UCLA planning student in 1982 took Shoup's class on public resource economics.

"Don has been saying the exact same thing for 40 years, and finally the world is listening to him."

Fulton, in fact, said he recently became a full-fledged Shoupista when Ventura implemented a Shoup-style parking management program and quickly saw the intended results. By charging for 400 of the 2,900 public parking spaces downtown, the city has spurred employees of local businesses to park at free city lots and walk to work rather than use curb spaces needed by customers.

Business owners, led by Parker, say that they are seeing far fewer customers since the parking meters became operational in September.

"You got to fight the stupid people, and Donald Shoup is an educated fool and Mayor Bill Fulton is an idiot for being a Shoupista. It's a cult," Kobylt ranted. [continue reading]

The million-dollar parking meters are driving away customers, downtown Ventura merchants told city officials Wednesday. 

In an emotional two-hour meeting led by Mayor Bill Fulton, a dozen downtown business owners shared personal woes of double-digit sales declines since the meters were turned on Sept. 14. Customers don't like the meters, have struggled to use them and complain they change the welcoming character of downtown, the owners said.

By now, you think elected officials would think twice before telling Carla Bonney that they won't answer her questions.

Yet that's what happened at Monday's Ventura City Council meeting, with just a handful of people in attendance to listen to the council discuss a ban on plastic bags.

Before the end of the week, Bonney was speaking to millions, as the firebrand Tea Party organizer took her fight against the ban onto national airwaves.

At Monday's meeting, Ventura City Councilmen Brian Brennan and Carl Morehouse attempted to ban single-use plastic bags, citing their danger to the environment. Instead, they succeeded only in persuading the council to vote 4-3 to have city staff work with agencies to find ways to reduce the amount of plastic bags in the community.

Councilmen Neal Andrews, Mike Tracy, and Jim Monahan voted against the resolution.  Andrews said a ban risked an unknown economic impact, household inconvenience and potentially even litigation.

"I heard a lot of the same rhetoric coming out of Sacramento from the folks that were donated to by the chemical lobby," said Brennan, prompting Andrews to later say that he's never accepted such donations.

At that point Bonney entered the chambers to address the council.

"You're overreaching," Bonney said. "And the whole point of the Tea Party is that our government is overreaching in every area of our lives."

Mayor Bill Fulton interrupted Bonney to explain that the public is prevented from asking any questions or engaging in dialog with the city officials.

Unfortunately, this is a pretty limited forum," Fulton curtly said.

Not one to keep quiet, Bonney found a forum that wasn't so limited Thursday afternoon when she called talk radio heavyweight Mark Levin to complain about the council's actions.

"We have to pay attention to our city councils because they're sneaking these things through," Bonney told Levin, whose voice reaches 8.5 million listeners a week.

"Where the hell did they get this power from?" Levin asked.

Levin is tied for the fourth largest talk radio audience, behind Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, according to Talkers magazine. He is also a bestselling author.

Bonney is most likely the first person to take the proceedings of a Ventura council meeting to millions of people across the country.

Maybe now Mayor Fulton might pay her a little more attention.

The Ventura City Council elected the mayor and deputy mayor tonight at City Hall, promoting newcomer Mike Tracy, the former police chief and top vote-getter, to deputy mayor over Neal Andrews, who traditionally would be next in line for that position and who received the second highest vote tally in last month's election.

"I know we've had differences of opinion and that he's been the odd man out," Councilman Carl Morehouse said while nominating Andrews, adding, "I think it's inappropriate to shut someone out of dialog just because you dissent with them." [continue reading]