The latest fly in my ointment - "alarm registration"

This is a small issue, but one that illustrates a basic flaw with most governments I've seen... the basic disconnect between "for the good of the community" they were set up to serve, and "for the good of the government" that they evolve towards.

Until this year, my city has had a simple, straightforward system for dealing with alarm systems, specifically for dealing with false alarms... the first one in a given year's free (accidents will happen), after which escalating fees and other requirements kick in to fix your brokenness. The end result of this setup (according to the numbers quoted in the notice I received): slightly over 1000 false alarm responses by the police, at an estimated cost of slightly under $45,000 over the course of 2008. If my math doesn't fail me, that's a per-alarm cost of $4.50... so, let's be generous (inflation and all that), and call it $5 per false alarm.

Now, being the rational sort that I am, if I considered this to be a problem (which, honestly, I don't... responding to potential property crimes in progress is part of the job of the police), I would look at either increasing the fines for false alarms (or, if that revenue stream wasn't reliable enough, a small fee on all alarm owners), and use that money to hire on more police help (with the numbers we're talking here, that's maybe only half or a third of a full hire... but I don't think most alarm owners would get too bent out of shape about hiring on added police capacity to ensure their alarm was responded to in a timely manner). Oh, but wait, that would involve administrative overhead to collect those piddling little funds, and might be portrayed as "raising your taxes", so we can't do that, can we?

Instead, the city has decided to bring in an outside company to do the administrative work, charging every residential alarm customer $25 a year ($15/year if no false alarms in the past year), and even more for business alarms... or, to put it another way, everybody who dares to own an alarm system gets to pay 3-5 times more (or even more for a business) than it cost, on average, for any false alarm they responded to in 2008... which, in and of itself, is a nuisance. However, they then take that money, and... wait for it... use it to make sure that your contact information is correct. That's it. The theory being that, if we can call you when your alarm goes off, you might tell us no, it's OK, I tripped the alarm myself, no worries, no need for the police to get involved.

But now, hang about a moment... if you have an alarm company, they're supposed to do that already. I mean, that's part of the purpose of having a monitoring company for an alarm... alarm goes off, they call to make sure it's not a problem and, failing that, call the police. So, the end result of this new system is, rather than improving public safety by hiring on additional police, the city is extorting funds from their citizens to fund a private company that duplicates what the alarm monitoring company is supposed to do for itself, on the off chance they're not... all so no elected official "looks bad" for raising taxes.

Now, for the part that really chaps my hide... I'm a homeowner, I have an old alarm system still mostly doing what it's supposed to do, but I don't have a monitoring company (haven't for years, and it's disconnected from the phone line entirely), just the audible alarm. It's been tripped a couple of times (usually when I'm out-of-town and have somebody drop by to feed the cats), and I haven't seen or heard from any police officers in that time, so the "false alarm mitigation" argument doesn't really fly for me... but, unless I uninstall the system or disable the klaxon, I'm still liable for the fee. Worst of all... I'm actually going to pay the fee, rather than muck with the system, because I'm reasonably certain I get more than $15/$25 off my homeowner's insurance over the course of a year for having a local alarm system. Well, at least they'll have my phone number right, when they need to call me about that alarm they happened to drive by and hear going off, I guess... :/