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Don't Crash In Petaluma

Lorry said:
I may be misunderstanding your comment, but I don't think it means that 1/3 of the people were not insured, but that their policies don't cover crash recovery fees.

I've never heard of this charge before and I have no idea if my insurance (Allstate) covers crash recovery tax in Petaluma.
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It reads to me like 30 of them had insurance that didn't cover it, and 60 of them had no insurance from which to try to collect.
 
MrIncredible said:
IIRC it's a fee on top of ones taxes, hence the outrage.
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Nope, read the article. It was a city fire department that offers coverage to people living outside city limits (and thus not paying taxes to support the fire department) if they choose to pay an annual fee.

Accepting consequences is part of the price of having free choice.
 
TTTom said:
Nope, read the article. It was a city fire department that offers coverage to people living outside city limits (and thus not paying taxes to support the fire department) if they choose to pay an annual fee.

Accepting consequences is part of the price of having free choice.
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For me it's more about just watching a house burn and not offering any alternative than the tax itself.

Not exactly the moral time or place to teach a lesson.

They could bill them the full cost of everything for the duration of the emergency. Water, labor, gas, etc.
So many more alternatives that are likely more profitable than leaving someone homeless and destitute.
 
EjGlows said:
Being on a board going up and down the hills sucks. Ask for more drugs.
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It sure does. And it'll suck more when you find out they bill for the same "recovery" fee.
 
hmmmm, pay taxes to "promote the general welfare" then pay again if you actually use the services??

Does Safeway charge to provide the store and charge again if you eat the food?
 
nebulous said:
hmmmm, pay taxes to "promote the general welfare" then pay again if you actually use the services??

Does Safeway charge to provide the store and charge again if you eat the food?
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Things are done differently in Petaluma...You might be charged to park in the parking lot,
so you can go in the store to shop there.

There is an alternative ....Don't go to Petaluma.
 
Daks said:
For me it's more about just watching a house burn and not offering any alternative than the tax itself.

Not exactly the moral time or place to teach a lesson.

They could bill them the full cost of everything for the duration of the emergency. Water, labor, gas, etc.
So many more alternatives that are likely more profitable than leaving someone homeless and destitute.
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The fire department would be out of theri legal jurisdiction, they'd have no authority to bill anyone, no liability coverage and any contract that was agreed to under duress (like when someone's house is burning down) would be totally unenforceable and invalid.

Put the blame where it belongs... you've got a bunch of people who don't want to pay for a county fire department, don't want to start up and support their own volunteer fire department and aren't even willing to pay a minimal annual fee to get coverage from a nearby city FD.

Everybody wants to collect welfare, nobody wants to pay taxes.
 
This is a fairly common practice that several cities have tried with mostly poor returns. Usually the city is looking for free money and they look at the cost of serving out-of-town residents in road accidents. For instance, Sacramento calculated it was spending over a million dollars a year, IIRC, on responses to incidents along I-5 to travelers that weren't local residents. Sounds great for the city, right?

Well, no. This process usually starts because the city is approached by a private company offering to recover $$$'s from insurance companies. "Free" money to the city and there is no municipal cost to administer the collection because they just pay the private company "a small fee" per instance. Path-of-least-resistance yokel politicians jump on the bandwagon. However, estimates of dollars the program will generate are too high by...oh...hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. So the city earns the animosity of travelers, capitilizes on the suffering of accident victims and angers surrounding municipalities while bringing in a pittance; usually so little the program is abandoned after a few years. There was so much protest in Sacramento from businesses and surround cities that the crash tax was repealed in just a few months.

I predict Petaluma's effort will be short-lived. The Sacramento Bee did an investigation proving none of these programs are regular revenue generators.
 
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louemc said:
Things are done differently in Petaluma...You might be charged to park in the parking lot,
so you can go in the store to shop there.
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That sounds a lot like San Francisco to me.
 
boney said:
That sounds a lot like San Francisco to me.
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Sunday meter enforcement really flipped the switch for me in SF. I recently bout a place in the city and I was considering units without parking. Thank Jeebus I found a place that has deeded parking. I would be so screwed without a garage.
 
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