To the Editor:
It is very disheartening to discover the men and women elected to high office in Washington, D.C. have decided to set prices for hourly labor employed by privately owned businesses. Like their counterparts in Alexandria, they were elected to tend to safety, streets and schools. They were not elected to run, even partially, businesses they don't own.
Their rationale for arbitrarily specifying a new and significantly higher minimum wage: it's too expensive to live in D.C. Hourly workers need more money. However, when businesses pass on the higher minimum wage to consumers in the form of higher prices, the consequence of Mayor Browser and her City Council emulating Cuba, Venezuela and other failed states will be to make it even more expensive to live in D.C.
Alexandria is not immune from government over-reach. Our cost of living is higher than it need be because the Alexandria government runs at a great loss a string of businesses. Among them are the bus company, the bike share program and a batch of swimming pools. Unable to operate these enterprises profitably, it is forced to use your tax dollars to subsidize them.
And there's more to come: A new swimming pool for use by a minuscule number of competitive swimmers in Alexandria will cost taxpayers more or less a cool $15 million. Although the swimmers' parents seeking this state of the art pool are cost-sharing its construction, their contribution is dwarfed by yours.
And now we have a new parking enforcement program that requires a full-fledged court appearance to dispute a parking ticket. I suspect if someone did a cost-benefit analysis of this program that it would reveal the city has created another money-losing enterprise.
All the cars, their gas and maintenance; the new personnel including their training, uniforms and equipment plus their wages, benefits and pensions, cost heaps of money. To pay for these costs, our parking Gestapo has to issue a lot of tickets. For example, to generate just $2 million in parking fines requires roughly 140 tickets per day, including on snow days, Sundays and holidays, at $40 a pop. That's a lot of parking tickets.
It's hard to believe this enterprise covers its overhead much less produces a profit. And how about the hidden costs? The tourists and day shoppers who get a ticket they can't contest unless they appear in court will think twice about returning to Alexandria. Even D.C. permits tickets to be contested by mail.
Jimm Roberts
Alexandria