Here is one example of the incompetence of some of our employees. This is a photo of the rental letter the city apparently randomly sends out to targeted residents (you can click on the smaller image to load the legible large size image). As you can clearly see, in the first paragraph it states that if you do not pay the fee by a certain date the fee will be doubled, further you may be issued a citation.

As you continue down the letter, in the last paragraph it once again clearly tells the recipient to call their office if the city is in error. It states you will be removed from future mailings.

Why then are people, that do not own rental property, still getting letters for the third year in a row? Maybe it is because when you call the number on the letter you are told that you are stupid and that because you may decide sometime in the future that you will rent your property, that the city chooses to waste resources and money to mail these letters and that they will not remove you from their list. In fact they tell you to simply ignore the letter.

So let me get this straight. The city council passes an ordinance (usually at the urging of city staff), and now city employees tell residents to simply ignore the ordinance? And these people still have a job?

I think that any city employee that tells a resident to ignore a city ordinance should be terminated at once. Especially when they have been wasting city resources (apparently in an attempt to justify their jobs). Why can't the city simply correct the mailing list? That way they wouldn't need to waste money and natural resources and residents will not have to keep calling, and waste our time trying to deal with an incompetent city department.