So I get home today and check the mail. Only one bill today from the alarm company.
When I open the envelope, I expect to see my monthly monitoring charge. But what’s this!!?? There’s an additional $17 on my bill! I know I paid last month’s bill and that amount isn’t even a full month’s charge.
I call the alarm company and it turns out the greedy fuckers who run this city have decided to charge all residential alarm customers a $12 annual fee to “help defray the costs of false alarms”. I had to pay a pro-rated fee to “catch me up” and “make me current”.
In the 10 years I’ve had an alarm system, I’ve had one false alarm (the lock on my back door unsprung itself and I had to climb in through a window). It took the police FORTY-FIVE MINUTES to show up. Now I have to pay a fee to help “defray” (read: line someone’s pocket) costs associated with false alarms.
They also charge a fee based on the number of false alarms:
4-6 = $100/ea
7-13 = $150/ea
14+ = $200/ea
Yes, it’s true that the pocket-lining only costs $1 per month, but that’s $1 too much.
So, fuck you, you fucking greedy fucking fuckers. I hope you fucking choke on my fucking dollar every fucking month.
Hate to say it Blue Sky but like any other system in a society, the decent people on correct side of the rules, pay for the shiftless meatbags on the other. False alarms cost the Dept. I work for tens of thousands in resources every year, and we’re relatively small in comparison to Savannah. It’s a burgeoning problem in the Public Safety arena, one that strips resources from REAL crime, and REAL problems. It’s the price of having an alarm, and yeah, it sucks, but it’s not just pocket lining, I can promise you that.
Perhaps that would be the case if the city provided alarm systems for all. If a business or home owner purchases an alarm, and causes a drain on police resources by constantly sending false alarms, I’d expect that person to pay for it, not everybody.
The city of Fremont, here in the Bay Area, recently decided to stop responding to alarms. No option to pay extra or anything like that. No warning eiter, AFAIK. It was just “We’re no longer going to respond to calls from security systems.”
WAG, but I think that would be harder to collect, whereas making the tax payable through the alarm company is very, very easy.
False alarms have been very costly in LAPD land. So much so that the LAPD considered not even responding to alarms unless someone called to say it wasn’t a false alarm.
Hard to belive that idea didn’t go over well.
Now, I think the rule is they charge you after X number of false alarm responses, or something like that.
When I was in Georgia, there was a state-run mental hospital in Savannah (no, in fact, I wasn’t. But thanks for thinking it) that was short on funding. So they closed on Sundays.
The building was VACANT on Sundays.
Savannah was a really interesting place on the weekends.
So the false alarm that you caused by climbing in through your window and that, despite the poor response time undoubtedly cost the city more than $17, has cost you $17. So you’ve paid to date an average of $1.70 per year to cover the cost of false alarms.
My eyes are surprisingly dry of tears. You’ve gotten off cheap. I’d be willing to bet that if you pay this fee from now until you die you won’t pay the cost of that one false alarm.
Anyway, you get to have THREE false alarms before they start charging you $100+.
Plus, that incident was about six years ago. If that had not been a false alarm, the 45 minutes it took the police to finally show up would have given the theoretical thieves more than enough time to clean me out. I suppose that extra buck a month is going to make them suddenly appear at door?
Of course, if I were a dick (like Superman), I’d deliberately set off the alarm three times a year for no reason other than to get my dollar’s worth and/or as a protest.
In all fairness, cities are getting hammered by unfunded mandates from above. Pols pass a lot of spiffy feel-good laws but neglect to pass along the bucks to pay for them. Staties and/or feds are very adept at imposing requirements that other schmucks down the food chain must either raise taxes or fees to cover.
Our current flap is storm water runoff. The feds require stringent handling but of course didn’t pass along money to pay for it. They were too busy waving the flag and posing for cameras over their tax cuts. So municipalities have to figure out payment systems based on impermeable ground cover: parking lots, footprint of houses, etc. Fee time in the city, guys. And that’s on top of meeting the basic services, with the hellish increases in health insurance.
It sucks, but it isn’t suprising. The buck stops somewhere, and it’s usual at the local level. Some handle it better than others, though.
Worse in Savannah, where the mandates come from below. Far, far below where that red guy hangs out.
A big issue here right now is traffic (a common enough problem in mid-size and up cities).
After spending who knows how many dollars, the brainiacs came up with the idea of building a 20 ft tall elevated road down the middle of town and having tunnels going underneath where the major crossroads pass through. It would have cost about $100 million dollars and about 100 houses and 2 or 3 dozen businesses that would have to be plowed under.
All this for a 2 or 3 mile stretch of road that would benefit less than 10% of the city’s population and would be outdated soon after the 3 years it would have taken to build.
This city has had a long history of short-sighted people in charge.
I’ve just looked up what my city does. You have to get a permit (piece of cake - just a technicality) to get an alarm system. After five(!) false intrusion alarms in one year, they change your permit to a “general response” call, which is that if a cop is in the area and has nothing better to do, he can show up if he feels like it. Panic alarm false alarms are fined $50.
That’d be great. More opportunities for “random acts of kindness.”
Why be satisfied with just feeding expired parking meters when you can put bricks through the windshields of cars that are cycling through the siren sounds for no reason, sparing the owner a hefty fine?
That would make me feel warm and fuzzy inside all day.
Sorry, I have to do this slight hijack. On our way down to Florida last winter we stopped in Savannah overnight. The next morning we took one of the bus tours. You live in one of the most beautiful cities I have ever been in. The architecture and scenery were amazing. Of course, I am sure there are other areas the bus didn’t go near but what we saw will remain in our memories forever.
