12/1/98
Nightmare
on Efrata Street
Put Daffy Duck up against Jerusalem Mayor Olmert
in the next election, and the duck will win in a landslide
-- at least, on Efrata Street in Talpiot.
Oh, they are mad on Efrata.
It is one of the city's prettier streets. Great
old pine trees arch across it from both sides. No sidewalks.
Relaxed, easygoing folk. Right in the middle of town,
Efrata is rustlingly rural, genteel and countrified
cozy.
Was.
Efrata is now a mudbath, citifying with cement
curbs many of the residents don't want, bristling with
apoplectic rage at a municipal government that seems
insensitive. The towering 70-year-old pines -- which
City Hall has already attempted to hack down, before
backing off following demonstrations -- may again be
endangered, by the roadwork.
It's not just that Efrata is now getting sidewalks.
Many Efratans emphatically do not want
sidewalks in front of their homes, they want to preserve
the rustic flavor, and they've made their thoughts very
clear to the people who manage their city.
It's not just that City Hall brusquely disregarded
the residents. Whether they want sidewalks or not, they're
damn well gonna have 'em -- and they're gonna
pay for 'em.
The Moss family is forced to pay NIS 10,079.
The Jonahs have to come up with NIS 18,000. Within
30 days. They're just a normal, middle-class family,
choking on their debts and overdraft.
It's not just that the nice people of Efrata
have to fork out upwards of NIS 8,000 per household,
immediately, for sidewalks they've never had, never
needed and don't want: what do you think arrived in
the mail soon after these charges?
Yup.
Arnona bills. The municipal tax that is supposed
to pay for such things as roadworks.
And not just that. Arnona, which annually plunges
us into economic gloom at this time of year, was just
raised an outrageous 18 percent.
The city is making off like bandits, holding
up the Jonahs for a total of NIS 25,000 -- and
telling them in a mass PR campaign that it's for their
own good. (Wonder how much those slick, glossy brochures
extolling the virtues of Arnona cost each of us?)
So. Are you going to vote for Olmert?
"I would have," said one resident who
only just moved there a few weeks ago, "but now?
Are you nuts?"
Michael and Yaffa Shira Caplan, a young
couple in their 20s, scraped together what they could
to buy an apartment there. They're not moneyed -- he's
a writer, she, a teacher -- and now, they're in deep
trouble. "We got a bill for NIS 15,000, and wondered
how we're going to come up with it," Michael says.
"Then, a week later, we were hit with Arnona: another
5,000. We'll have to take out a loan." (Never mind,
Michael: it's for your own good.)
The Caplans live at the end of Efrata -- which
already has sidewalks.
"It's ludicrous,ג€ Michael fumes. ג€What's
Arnona for anyway?"
Not for this kind of work, says Municipal Spokeswoman
Johanne Malka. "Arnona does not cover such costs,"
she says, adding that "the practise of billing
residents [for roadwork] is in fact common, it is done
in other cities in Israel as well as abroad."
To be fair, let's give our roadworks department
a little credit in this case. Ordinarily, when they
rip up a road and give it that war-zone look for a few
months, and then finally finish the job with a nice,
smooth layer of asphalt, they go home for lunch then
return to rip up the road all over again because they
forgot to put in a pipe, or they lost a shovel down
there. This time, however, they figured, hey -- if we're
already putting in a sidewalk, let's go the distance.
Which is why Efrata is also getting an entirely
new street, plus state-of-the-art, world-class, cutting-edge,
finest-anywhere drainage.
The people who live there are a little surprised
to learn they need a new street surface. And by the
sound of it, City Hall has not exactly been flooded
with drainage complaints from these folks.
"There are no real problems with the street.
Efrata is old, but solid," says Tzippi Moss, a
member of the street committee fighting the exorbitant
bills. Moss is one who feels no need for sidewalks,
even though she does not own a car, and therefore should
be the first one clamoring for sidewalks.
But -- American that she is (Moss hails from
Milwaukee) -- she admits that some of her neighbors
disagree, and so yields to the vagaries of democracy.
What she's fighting is "the lack of correlation
between the cost of the work, and what we're being made
to pay."
This, she says, smacks of hidden taxation: a
poor city goosing its middle-class to make up for the
huge and ever-growing sector that doesn't pull its weight.
"The city is carrying on its back populations that
can't carry their load, and we have to subsidize them."
"What we're paying," says Caplan, "does
not reflect the cost of the job."
Both Moss and Caplan, it appears, are absolutely
right.
"According to the law," says spokeswoman
Malka, "the sum is set by tariff, based on a home's
metrage. There is no relation between the fee and the
cost of the work."
She was admirably cooperative and professional
despite my relentless demands for answers. But the numbers
she was given just don't add up.
"Residents are never billed for the whole
amount," she says. "The Municipality subsidizes
more than half the cost."
Well, what is the cost?
Does five million sound reasonable?
For a new airport runway, maybe; for a two-block
stretch of road improvement, probably not.
According to the committee's accounting, they've
been billed NIS 2,203,487 -- and that's only including
the neighbors they've managed to ask. Moss says a final
figure of NIS
2.5 m. would be about right.
According to the city's accounting, its 50%-plus
share would put the cost at over NIS 5 million.
Dogged investigation turned up this: the city
expects the whole thing to cost just NIS 2 million --
for both Efrata and an adjoining street.
Which means the good burghers of Efrata are probably
being bilked for four or five times the amount they
should be paying -- if indeed they should be paying
anything at all.
Uzi Sivan has been saddled with a bill of about
NIS 15,000. He's a lot more pragmatic about it than
anyone else. "Jerusalem is the poorest city in
Israel, with a large percentage of residents under the
poverty line. The haredim have large families, they
don't work, and so the city takes only a token amount
of tax from them. The same is true for the city's Arabs.
But that was decided not by the city, but by the Knesset.
It's political.
"We are paying more because they pay less.
It's not fair. But that's the law."
Sivan -- whose daughter also owns a home on Efrata
-- has discussed the matter with his neighbors, but
declines to join the battle against the city. It wouldn't
be right, he says.
After all, he's not just a resident of Efrata.
He also happens to be the city comptroller.
