The costs of battling strawberry scourge

By George Bachich

On the front page of the May 15 Napa Valley Register (“Sell fruit, go to jail” by Marsha Dorgan), I see an excellent opportunity to help balance the Napa city budget in these troubled economic times. Simply cut back on the police department staffing and overtime that has been such a strain on city finances.

According to Dorgan’s article, the Napa Police Department has sufficient surplus resources and such slack demand for its services that it can dedicate an unmarked SUV; a black-and-white; and several officers, including an interpreter and a public information officer, to a six-week zero-tolerance sting operation against strawberry vendors.

To save the taxpayers some money and to avoid having to raise taxes, surely we can ask our citizens to make the small sacrifice of defending themselves against those dastardly fruit sellers. I mean, if push comes to shove, and the vendors’ wares seem seriously threatening, yet citizens just cannot resist buying, maybe they could band together to help each other throw the purchased fruit away. Surely, buying and destroying the fruit would be a lot cheaper than deploying several $150,000-per-year Napa police officers.

I understand that strawberries are a life-threatening scourge that must be eradicated despite the fact that no one has ever gotten sick from them. It’s just that I don’t think we can afford to have such expensive resources dedicated to the eradication. By the time you add up the salaries and benefits of the various officers, the use of the two police vehicles, the cost of towing away strawberry vans, the cost of keeping vendors in jail, the burden on the court system, and the extra gas that we will now have to burn by driving farther to get our strawberries, I think just eating the strawberries would eradicate them just as well and cost a lot less.

The simple truth is that we all want those strawberries even if they don’t carry the Napa City Council’s pompous seal of approval. If there were not a real demand for those berries, the vendors would not be able to sell them. The fact that we buy them is proof that the vendors are performing a desired service. They should be rewarded for their industriousness and willingness to serve, not harassed.

I say the police department is less than useless if this is what they do. Not only are they not performing a service of value to us, they are damaging us by depriving us of conveniently available strawberries, wasting our money on harassment, embarrassing us with their irrelevance and diverting our essential resources away from real crime. If we don’t have enough real crime to keep all our officers busy, then I think we should substantially reduce the Napa Police Department budget.

(Bachich lives in Napa.)

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