The Roman Emperor Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus (AD 15 – AD
68), had several confusing names. Yet, in the short form, Nero,
everyone remembers him as the emperor who
”
fiddled while Rome burned.
”
The Roman Emperor Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus (AD 15 – AD 68), had several confusing names. Yet, in the short form, Nero, everyone remembers him as the emperor who “fiddled while Rome burned.” Actually, the Romans didn’t have fiddles, so he “climbed on to the palace roof” and sang a song during the inferno. Nero is long gone, but the expression lives on to mean doing something trivial and irresponsible in the midst of an emergency – and so it was that the Hollister City Council fiddled away on the evening of 22 January.
Another week had gone by without any council action to counter the looming disaster caused by the current economic conditions and the real estate market. It’s hard to believe that the elected officials responsible for the economic health of the entire city could be so insulated in light of the facts everyone else can see.
Even Congress is getting in on the act with a stimulus package. Note to the Hollister City Council: If the lumbering behemoth of the federal government is ahead of you on the power curve, you are in big trouble.
There are more than 170 empty properties in Hollister, and the count is likely to rise. The value of those properties is decreasing every day, and worse, they are dragging down the values of their neighbors’ homes, ruining their neighborhoods and adding months, maybe years, to the schedule for our economic recovery.
Meanwhile, the city has done little to stem the tide. Some properties are boarded up, red-tagged or otherwise posted, but that’s no compensation when you are subjected to the infectious rolling blight of abandoned homes.
I’m one of the lucky ones. There are no abandoned houses on my street. However, at the suggestion of a resident, I took a ride around town and it’s not a pretty sight. Yet, the city council was so busy rubber-stamping $55,000 in Redevelopment Agency loans of questionable priority that they could not find the political will, or a single dollar, to start two desperately needed programs – foreclosure prevention counseling and new homebuyer education. What are they waiting for, 200 abandoned properties, or is the magic number 250?
Now is the perfect opportunity to show the public how tax money can be leveraged to help taxpayers, but instead of immediate action, the council was busy buying the old Leatherback Corp. site for a downtown homeless shelter. Actually, that might work out in the end because if the council keeps this up, there are going to be a lot more homeless people in Hollister than ever before, and most of them will be former homeowners.
Not only did they fail to act – it wasn’t even on the agenda. Perhaps, now that the Hollister Free Lance publishes only two days a week, no one on the council reads a newspaper and, therefore, they are not aware of the problem. I recommend they ponder the government’s initial response to Hurricane Katrina. The lesson is, if you wait until you’re underwater to start bailing, you’ve waited too long.
We could get lucky, but if things go against us, part of the blame has to go to the public. If it were not for the usual suspects, the city council chambers would have been almost empty. It’s strange, any discussion of the Hollister Motorcycle Rally, a proposed new development or a change at the Hollister Municipal Airport brings out the crowds, but the public can’t be bothered to try to save the city as a whole. That’s too bad.
Perhaps the public is too busy or just too lethargic to care. And by not caring, they send the message to the city council members that it’s OK to stay engrossed in their narrow, individual agendas and not worry about the city. If so, they took it to heart, lacking real fiddles or the desire to sing. They just twiddled their thumbs as neighborhoods and the tax base suffered.
I have disagreed with the city council on several issues and supported them on others. At times, council members have shown flashes of leadership.
This was not one of those times.
They could do a lot better and they should. Instead, my guess is that if the roof caves in, they are going to blame it on the ever-present whipping boy, the building moratorium.
