Are You Alarmed? I Am

My Sweet Baboo and I disagree on the recent proposal from the City of Syracuse to assess a $50 annual fee for homeowners and businesses with alarm systems.  He's against it, and I'm perfectly OK with it, because I believe we need to start being reasonable if we're to make a dent in solving our city's problems.

The alarm proposal, if passed, would mean that something like 10,000 people and businesses with alarms would have to pay the fee, after exemptions for over those over 65 or disabled. As proposed, the $50 would be charged to the 86 alarm companies that have systems in Syracuse, who would pass the charge on to folks like us..

Our home is in The Valley - North Valley, or NoSen (north of Seneca Turnpike) to be precise.  My Baboo bought the house back in the late 80's. The neighborhood is fine - we're near Meacham Field, there's a Christian school just down the block, single family homes on both sides of the street, and we've got two awesome ice cream places and a few restaurants within walking distance. 

Ten years ago, when we got together, I asked if we could have an alarm installed, not because "the police don't do their jobs" as some people have suggested on discussion forums, but for the peace of mind that having the system brings. In that time, we had one incident of someone taking stuff out of unlocked cars (we were dumb and it cost us $16), and the time when an idiot threw a small rock through our front door, in a clear case of mistaken address identity.

Shortly after having the alarm system installed, I was at work and received a call from ADT telling me that the alarm was going off at the house and that the police had been dispatched.  I raced home  to find everything locked, just as we left it. Two or three days later, the same thing -- call from alarm company, race home, no issues.   I started feeling a little antsy that the Syracuse Police Department would not think highly of us if this continued.  We had ADT come back out, make some tweaks, and we were fine for quite a while. 

I think there may have been one other random false alarm tied to the front door (as the first two were) over the years, and then a situation last year, when we were at dinner and got a call from ADT that the alarm was triggered on the back door; again, the police were sent and fortunately nothing was wrong.

So, over the course of 10 years, we've had four false alarms at our house, all of which resulted in police being dispatched to wander around the house, find everything secure, and leave. And therein lies the issue; take a look at the most recent data: 

• In 2011, Syracuse police responded to 2,635 residential alarms, of which 83% (2,183) were false alarms.
• On the business alarm side of things, there were 7,088 calls, only 14%  (995) were false alarms.

Is a dollar a week too 'alarming' an insurance policy for potentially taking the police away from more important things to come and check out my house, which is almost always going to be a false alarm? I don't think so, and that's what I told my Baboo.

Here's what does alarm me, however: Syracuse has had an alarm fee law on the books for years -- since the mid-1990s  -- and has never implemented it.  Why?  Because they couldn't figure out how to, or because they didn't have the courage to enforce it.

Syracuse has had a law on the books since 1995 requiring alarm owners to pay $30 a year. The 1995 law has never been enforced, city officials said. If it had, the city would have collected roughly $4.5 million over the past 18 years, The Post-Standard estimates, based on a 1995 projection made by city officials... City hall officials can’t say with certainty why the 1995 law was never enforced. But they surmise that the city never established an efficient mechanism for collecting the fees, which were supposed to be paid by residents and businesses.

It boggles my mind why Syracuse doesn't collect the money they're allowed to collect.  We are a city with a huge financial issue, and yet we leave millions on the table every year, through lackadaisical enforcement (as with the parking scofflaw program), through a lack of creativity or efficiency in enforcing laws that get passed, which is apparently the case here, or because of a lack of courage on the part of the people we elect to manage the city. 

On the alarm fee proposal, I'd keep it in place for residences, but would not charge businesses unless the false alarm rate exceeds a certain percentage, because statistically the vast majority of those are 'real' calls, not wastes of law enforcement time and effort.

And, as to the issue of efficiently collecting the fee, why not try billing people for it on their tax bills. The City Finance Department knows how to send those out, right? Have a programmer add a line for 'residential alarm insurance' and call it a day.

Again, we need to be reasonable if we're going to keep our city afloat financially.

We can start by having the Common Council get over their fear of upsetting anyone, by having the city enforce laws on the books, and by having city residents pay our fair share of reasonable fees -- in this case, about a dollar a week -- so that less reasonable fees don't end up on the books.