The point has arrived in this curious and troubling deliberation over
the fate of motor homes in Costa Mesa where we can fairly call the city's
intended actions a kind of legislative carjacking. That's because on
Monday, a small majority of the City Council inched closer to slashing
the tires -- figuratively speaking -- of motor home owners in this town.
Now if you're one those RVs-are-a-cancer-on-society boosters, this is
welcome news. But only because it's not a liberty of yours that's in
danger of being snatched, without cause, from beneath your nose. For
red-blooded, freedom-loving Costa Mesans like Bill Folsom -- a
law-abiding motor home owner -- the council's action has to leave them
wondering if they're living in a gulag.
I'm less inclined to do any wondering at all at this point. I mean,
it's bad enough that government, in any form, is inclined to indulge
itself in lawmaking for lack of any clue about what it might do if it
weren't lawmaking. But when it begins to construct Byzantine shackles on
freedoms without any substantive evidence that those freedoms pose a
threat to the public trust and welfare, then a gulag it is. Here's what
we have.
Fearing that our fair township of Costa Mesa is under siege by an
invading force of illegally parked motor homes, the City Council has been
of a mind since October to ban the parking of these things on city
streets altogether. To be fair, the council has dispensed dashes of
benevolence -- though grudgingly and incrementally -- as it entertains
exceptions to the rule.
The council first noodled on language that would allow motor home
owners to park their vehicles on the street in front of their homes for a
period not to exceed 24 hours. But they could only do so "for purposes of
loading, unloading, cleaning, battery charging, or other activity
preparatory or incidental to travel."
When the constraints of those legal handcuffs reached the city's motor
home owners, they descended on council chambers en masse, torching the
dais with complaints that 24 hours wasn't nearly long enough to prepare
for or return from their road trips. Singed, the council retreated to
give the ordinance more thought.
What emerged Monday from the January confab -- and the clubbing the
council took -- was an elaborate legal noose that gave the motor home
owners the 72 hours they wanted (and which is the amount of time the
current law allows). But it also sought to codify what can only be
construed, in my estimation, as a scarlet letter.
