Vile Liberal Occupy Movement Killed The Grass At L.A. City Hall – What Should Be Done Now?

The LA Times has this to say about the Occupy Movement’s only documented “accomplishment” thus far:

Now, about L.A. City Hall’s lawn
Occupy L.A. has killed the grass. A water-wise garden should take its place.
By Emily Green
November 16, 2011

Whatever the accomplishments of Occupy L.A. when it finally decamps — or gets evicted — from around City Hall, one positive achievement is already clear: It has killed the lawn.

The Times’ editorial board has harrumphed about the taxpayer expense of replacing one of downtown’s “rare green spaces,” and it worries that the “majestic figs” are at risk. Last week, the Department of Recreation and Parks sent an aggrieved letter to the mayor about signs nailed to trees, broken sprinkler heads and compacted soil. The nails and compacted soil are unfortunate. But really, Rec and Parks is missing the point. Occupy L.A. has given City Hall the chance to walk its talk.

For more than two years, the mayor and the City Council have been preaching water conservation. Yet since they instituted a citywide sprinkler ordinance in 2009, and even started paying single-family homes a buck a square foot to rip out lawns, by the Department of Water and Power’s own estimate 54% of the water used by single-family homes still goes outside. The government is almost as profligate: 41% of its water is outdoor use. Much of this goes to lawns.

Los Angeles cannot be expected to improve these numbers unless the mayor and the City Council lead by example. Other cities, such as Austin, Texas, understand this. In 2004, Austin responded to chronic overuse of the local aquifer by surrounding its City Hall with native gardens irrigated by a rain-catchment system.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles has left a plan for re-landscaping City Hall with a similarly progressive garden stuck somewhere between the bureaus of sanitation and engineering. City officials will neither confirm nor deny the existence of the plan, but word in the landscape design community is that it is stalled because of lack of funds.

This insistence that we cling to a wasteful model because conservation is too expensive doesn’t scan. Whatever hard times the city faces, the real deficit isn’t money. It’s skill. The inertia isn’t budgetary. It’s cultural.

Until Occupy L.A. smothered it last month, lawn remained around Los Angeles City Hall in part because that’s what Rec and Parks knows how to tend. To have a garden that celebrates our Mediterranean climate the way Austin’s salutes Texas prairie, Rec and Parks staff would need to learn how to weed instead of mow, mulch instead of blow and maintain drip irrigation instead of sprinklers.

Since the largely drought-tolerant sweeps of palo verde trees, succulents and desert palms went in near City Hall around police headquarters in 2009, lead landscape architect Scott Baker has become so demoralized by Rec and Parks maintenance that he sounds halfway between heartbroken and bitter. Asked what might be done around City Hall, he said, “I don’t think that this city deserves any great green spaces until they can figure out ahead of time how to maintain it.”

Thanks to Occupy L.A., Los Angeles will have the perfect place to learn. Stephen Billings, landscape architect behind the year-old gardens around the Valley Performing Arts Center in Northridge, managed the wide use of native trees and grasses only by working from inception with the facilities staff of Cal State Northridge. As Billings sees it, the teaching gardens around City Hall could be temporary until grounds staff were skilled enough to maintain a suitably stately model. “It’s a new time,” he said. “It’s about learning. It’s not about keeping up appearances.”

[…]

And the article continues to drone on and on.  Blah blah blah.  And then more blah.

You see, I’ve got a much better way to deal with the fact that liberals have killed the lawn and the landscaping around city hall.  Let it stay exactly as it is.

Let it remain exactly as it is as an object lesson of what liberalism does: it ruins.  It destroys.  It kills.  And then, of course, it seeks to take the very damn “crisis” that it itself created and turn it into yet another boondoggle symptom of the very liberalism that created the mess in the first place.

Oh, we might spend a few bucks on the formerly hallowed (before liberals pissed and crapped all over it) landscape of the formerly beautiful Los Angeles City Hall – to buy a big sign.  It would contain a “before” and “after” photo of the grounds and state simply, “Liberals did this.  Don’t let them do it to you.”

My solution will be far, FAR less expensive than Emily Green’s.  And it will actually tell the real story.

Here’s another solution: make the worthless Occupy cockroaches get off the damn grass or at least confiscate every single thing that the as a “community” own to force them to pay for the millions of dollars in taxpayer money they (literally) pissed away.  Because I bet liberals would actually start getting responsible about the trillions of dollars they piss away every damn year if it was THEIR DAMN MONEY.

Tags: city hall, grass, liberals, Los Angeles, Occupy, vandalism