Why stop at charging for job center?

The Pilot has endorsed the idea of Costa Mesa Mayor Gary Monahan and

Councilman Allan Mansoor of trying to charge surrounding cities for

their residents who use the Costa Mesa Job Center as a way of sharing

the cost. But why should we limit that idea to just one city expense?

Thousands of drivers from Newport Beach and Huntington Beach and

Fountain Valley and Irvine and Santa Ana and other cities drive on

Costa Mesa’s streets, wearing them down. Out-of-towners use our parks

and recreation areas, wearing them out. We should bill those cities

for those costs. And what about police services? Every day, Costa

Mesa police officers stop and arrest dozens of people from other

communities. We should bill all those cities for the time that this

takes. Think of all the money we’d rake in, collecting for those city

expenses, and dozens like them, that those free-loading

out-of-towners are using at Costa Mesa taxpayers’ expense.

Of course, there are a couple of small problems with this idea.

We’d have to hire an army of bureaucrats to keep track of all of

those non-Costa Mesans who are enjoying a free ride at our expense.

And we’d have to shoulder the cost of what Costa Mesans get for free

from other cities. It would be a pretty hefty bill we’d get from

Newport Beach for all of those Costa Mesa residents who use Newport’s

beaches, and their parks, and their streets, too. The county would

have to charge Costa Mesa for all of us who now use the airport for

free. And the state, strapped as it is for cash, would no doubt send

Costa Mesa a bill for its residents’ use of state highways, parks,

beaches and publicly-owned attractions. But it would be only fair,

right?

Or we could simply stop this foolishness about whether other

people are using our facilities and recognize that one fact of living

in a country like ours is that each of us pays directly for a lot of

things we don’t use, and each of us uses a lot of things we don’t

directly pay for, and that the beauty of this system is that we’re in

it together and nobody keeps track, because we all live together and

it all comes out pretty much even in the end. Remember “We the

People”?

Or is that America gone too?

JIM TOLEDANO

Costa Mesa

* JIM TOLEDANO is the former head of the Democratic Party of

Orange County.