The NebrasKan
Friday, August 2, 1985
Page 4
Editorial
Buckle up those
'belts and start
'biding them laws
Increased concern about traffic safety is evi
denced by passage of the seat belt law which
will go into effect in Nebraska Sept. 1. How
ever, this concern about safety has not evi
denced itself in the behavior of Lincoln drivers.
Traffic safety is a must in Lincoln with all the
construction work being done. Drivers should be
extra cautious and alert when driving around
these areas. The streets would be much safer if
drivers would simply obey the traffic laws.
Many Lincoln drivers seem to have forgotten
that a red light means stop. Even fewer remember
that yellow lights have any significance what
soever. Both lights are being ignored with
increasing frequency.
Some drivers also believe that these days they
can turn from whichever lane they happen to be
in as long as they look first. Many also disregard
crosswalks and drive : s fast through residential
areas as they do on i,;ain thoroughfares. These
two violations especially endanger children and
elderly pedestrians.
Another traffic hazzard in Lincoln is the bicy
clists who insist on taking the main streets as
their route. The city has provided an excellent
system of bike routes on streets that are wide
enough to accommodate bicyclists. The bicy
clists should use these instead of busy streets
such as Vine, 16th and 17th streets, especially
during rush hour traffic.
The non-bike route streets are too narrow for
the bicyclists. If they try to ride close to the curb,
the cars must still go around them, often nearly
hitting a car in the next lane. If the bicyclists try
to take up an entire lane, traffic backs up behind
them.
If bike routes were used and traffic laws
obeyed, driving in Lincoln would be much safer
and perhaps there would be no cause for
increased concern.
Editorial
Policy
Unsigned editorials represent official policy
of The Nebraskan, summer 1985 edition of the
Daily Nebraskan. Policy is set by The Nebraskan
Editorial Board. Its members are Stacie Thomas,
editor in chief; Gene Gentrup, news editor, Kat
hleen Green, associate news editor, Sandi Stuewe,
advertising manager; Mary Hupf, assistant ad
vertising manager, and Jim Rogers, editorial
columnist.
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of the university, its employees, the students or
the NU Board of Regents.
The Nebraskan's publishers are the regents,
who established the UNL Publications Board to
supervise the production of the paper.
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ALL MATERIAL COPYRIGHT 1985 DAILY NEBRASKAN
4
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Proposition 13 takes its toll
Legislation 'liberally5 topped with fees
This city, which is nothing if not novel in its
nonchalance about mere morals, is pio
neering a stern new style of governance. It
is the art of liberal governance in a conservative
era. It does not involve government spending for
social ends, but government causing private
sector spending. It is a reverberation of Proposi
tion 13, the 1978 measure that curtailed local
taxation in California.
j5f
George
Will
San Francisco's board of supervisors has decl
cared that downtown developers must pay a one
time fee of one dollar per square foot of floor
space to finance on-site child-care facilities or as
a contribution to a child-care fund to be allo
cated by the political system. This fee is piled on
top of other fees for transportation, housing, and
"open space" for parks. There's even a fee of one
percent of construction costs to purchase art.
This last means that a developer of a $100
million high-rise must pay $1 million for art.
Now, if the supervisors, having legislated a
monetary demand, can just legislate a supply of
good art . . .It is odd: The sort of people passing
and applauding such fees are not worshipers of
market forces. But unless they believe that the
demand for art will magically produce a supply
of good art, the fee is a windfall for lousy artists,
and a way to litter public spaces with eyesores.
Regarding child care, a need of sorts exists.
Nationally, 51 percent of mothers of children
under five work outside the home. Supervisor
Nancy Walker, sponsor of the child-care fee,
notes projections that in the next 15 years
100,000 new jobs will be created in downtown
San Francisco. It is possible to argue that child
care is a "social cost" of development and there
fore developers ought to pay for it. But such an
argument is problematic in the idea of "social
costs" and in the false clarity regarding who
actually pays.
Child flay care is a desire of a certain category
of workers. Should not the cost of it be borne by
those who desire it? But developers are an invit
ing target on which to displace the burden.
However, if the board of supervisors wants to
closely associate costs and benefits for services,
they should become really rigorous in imposing
user fees: Parents should be made to pay the full
cost of education, riders the cost of public
transportation, etc.
Because such services are understood to
benefit the comunity generally, they are usually
considered services to be paid for, at least in
part, by the community through its collective
enterprise: government. But in explaining the
resort to fees, political philosophy is less rele
vant than a political fact: Proposition 13. It
limited the ability of local governments to
impose taxes. It did not limit the public's desire
for services, or the desire of the political class to
distribute benefits.
So, here is a paradox. Proposition 13 was
produced by anger about the taxation dimension
of "big government." Now it is producing a new
mode of governance that is aggressively intrusive
and blurs the costs of government action.
The fees leviedon developers will mean higher
rents, and then higher prices of the goods and
services provided by the businesses that rent
space from the developers. Furthermore, San
Francisco's fees may help the toiling masses
in Oakland. Businesses may have their head
quarters in San Francisco but their labor con
centrations across the bay.
Bubbling behind San Francisco's government-by-regulation
is northern California leftism. It is
an amalgam of anti-growth, anti-business, peace
posing and eco-battiness.
There is an ordinance that no new building
shall cast a shadow on a public park between
one hour after sunup and one hour before sunset.
If shadows are awful, why not cut down the
trees? But, then, if people do not like the attrib
utes of cities density, tall buildings the
supervisors might do better by buying them bus
tickets to Montana.
The supervisors recently voted official sup
port for the grape boycott. It was an action of no
measurable value, to the grape pickers, but was
demonstrably detrimental to the 60,000 persons
(disproportionately minorities) who work in the
convention industry. Several agribusiness organ
izations have moved their meetings elsewhere.
The supervisors voted against San Francisco
being home for the battleship Missouri. The vote
was without force and the Navy ignored it. The
supervisors' rationale was that the ship might
cause the Soviets to make the bay area a military
target. Presumably the Soviets have not noticed
the various bay-area military installations, or
Livermore Lab. Surprisingly, the supervisors did
not impose a fee on the ship compensation for
wear-and-tear on the water with the money to
be spent at the discretion of the supervisors.
1985, Washington Post Writers Group
Letters
Unthoughtful parkers
ruin man 's day (and car)
On March 28, 1985, 1 was in Boulder, Colorado.
I ordered a new Honda Civic CRX. I bought it in
Boulder because the dealer here in Lincoln,
where I bought my last new Honda, didn't even
have one I could test drive.
I waited 98 days. It finally was delivered. I
drove all the way out to Boulder to pick it up. It is
a beautiful bright red car. I just love it. All of the
waiting was worth it.
I am a senior at the University of Nebraska,
Uncoln. I work full time during the day and
ittend classes at night. I wash, wax and admire
his little jewel every chance I get. I even took
everal rolls of pictures of it, before anything
light happen to it.
I am very careful when I drive it. I am even
more careful when I park it. I would walk an
extra two blocks if I thought my car would be
safer. I have even been driving to work a little
early in the morning so I can park it in a particu
lar spot in my company's parking lot. It is an end
spot, such that no one can park on the one side of
me. Whenever I park my car I walk around it and
make sure everything is OK. Before I get into it I
do the same.
Yep, you guessed it. Today in the company
parking lot somebody put that first scratch on
my shiny little car. A body and fender man said
it would cost $60 to make it look new again.
Somebody that works for the same company as I
do.
Is everybody careless? Does anybody know
how to drive, and park? Can anybody open their
doors without banging into the car next to them?
Anybody with half a brain could tell, if he cared
to look hey, we have a new car here!!!
My personal policy for parking my car is: If I
can't get into the space and in and out of my car
without damaging the car next to me, I park
somewhere else. Now wouldn't it be wonderful if
everybody would adhere to such a policy. I would
spend $60, even $100 to make my car look new
again if I thought it would stay that way more
than 26 days.
I went downtown and had a hamburger, then
went for a long walk, instead of studying Philo
sophy. At 6:30 I went to my Philosophy class.
Professor Becker was talking about euclidean
geometry, a priori synthetic reasoning, Riemann,
Einstein, parallel lines and curved space. I was
taking notes, but I was thinking about how diffi
cult it is to have something nice, and keep it that
way.
Bob Johnson
Arts & Sciences
senior