According to Wikipedia, a very unofficial online encyclopedia, April Fool’s Day (sometimes called All Fools’ Day) is celebrated every year on the first day of April as a day when people play practical jokes and hoaxes on each other. Based on this description, some of our politicians may qualify as “April fools.”
Who are they?
The Lompoc City Council for raising utility fees when they weren’t aware that the city had written off a couple of million dollars in uncollected fees and that the enterprise funds weren’t charging all users for the services they were receiving. Councils past and present can be faulted for allowing serious technology gaps that allow accounts to be kept on paper cards manually instead of using readily available electronic systems.
The city staff, supported by the current City Council, is in the process of fixing the problem but it could take a lot of money and a couple of years for the changes to produce tangible results. The current council is engaged in the government and they are responsive to those they were elected to represent. The city administrator they hired is a bulldog and has dug into longstanding fiefdoms to start fixing many old problems, such as collecting overdue utility fees.
The Santa Barbara City Council, which once again is proposing to build a desalinization plant. This plant has escalated in cost as time has gone on and ratepayers in the water district will be burdened with serious increases in their water bills even if the plant is once again mothballed. Not only is this type of water-producing technology grossly inefficient when you consider the amount of electric energy required to produce a gallon of water, but it likely won’t be used in wet years.
The last time they made a proposal like this, in the late 1990s, they completed a plant and then a subsequent council voted to sell it for pennies on the dollar. It appears that politicians are very poor business people and think nothing of wasting taxpayer dollars at the drop of the hat. How long will it be until another council decides to sell this one?
The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors for even thinking of giving themselves a hefty pay raise. This after they have mismanaged public monies and failed to maintain the public infrastructure. Facing strong public opposition, they toned down their proposal, but just the idea that they thought they could raise their pay when the people who pay their wages are losing money through increased taxes and fees was foolish.
It seems that elected officials value their service much more than the people they serve. Heck, it’s only tax money and if we raise taxes just a little bit we can provide more money for ourselves seems to be the prevailing thought.
The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives for an unending partisan stalemate because both parties seem to vote in lockstep. Instead of focusing on what’s best for the general population each political party seems to dig in their heels and simply reject anything the other party favors. This leads to a dysfunctional national government.
It seems that when we elect representatives they aren’t allowed to think for themselves — it’s the party movers and shakers who call the shots and the penalty for not towing the party line is that they abandon you in the next election and support someone committed to their agenda. This means that we are fools for electing them and think that our views will be represented.
President Barack Obama because of a litany of global failures overseen by his crew — blaming the former administration for all his problems seems petty at this point. Anyone who views the world situation objectively would have to say that the Middle East and Arab states were relatively calm when Obama and his far left team took over. Today it is chaos largely because of his faulty diplomatic logic.
All those “global warming” alarmists who refuse to acknowledge the fact that the weather has been changing since the Earth was created and they can’t control it. When confronted with irrefutable evidence that the Earth has actually cooled since they began their foolish campaign to stamp out human activity they then changed their mantra to say it is actually “climate change” that they are concerned about.
Of course, the only thing the chief proponents of this farce seem worried about is profiting from their doom and gloom predictions of weather related disaster. Of course, willing politicians have pandered to these beliefs and have wreaked havoc on industry and ordinary Americans who have to dig deeper into their pockets to pay for the dreams of a few misinformed — but vocal — hucksters.
When you consider these and other foolish things that we are subjected to on a regular basis by people who claim to be our leaders, it gives new meaning to All Fools’ Day. Let the April fools rule!
— Ron Fink, a Lompoc resident since 1975, is retired from the aerospace industry and has been active with Lompoc municipal government commissions and committee since 1992, including 12 years on the Lompoc Planning Commission. He is also a voting member of the Santa Barbara County Taxpayers Association. Contact him at news@noozhawk.com. The opinions expressed are his own.
