Corporate Welfare For Convenience Store Owners?

The Philsopher Kings of Spring Street are at it again, with another brilliant scheme to rob Peter to pay Paul:  corporate welfare, 7-11 style.

The plan is to take tax dollars from families struggling to keep food on their tables and roofs over their heads, and give that money to the owners of convenience stores to pay for remodeling.  And when I say "give," I mean "give."

Each owner would receive:

• $75,000 for remodeling, which the business owner would not have to repay, and which is misleadingly referred to as a "conditional loan;"
  
  
• a free exterior lighting "make-over," the cost of which is unspecified, to be paid from a $500,000 slush fund from funds collected by the DWP from you and me;
• $10,000 for architectural and engineering grants; and
• $10,000 for "technical assistance consultants [to] assist the participating business owner in their [sic] transition to carrying fresh produce, to identify product placement that maximizes attractiveness of health food options. . . . "

And you, yes YOU, my inattentive, over-taxed, under-appreciated fellow citizen, will pick up the tab for all of this.  Welfare for 7-11's, courtesy of you.  Plus, of course, you would be the one funding all the overhead for the genius staff of the CRA to administer this boondoggle.

City Council Members Perry, Cardenas and Wesson gave this idiocy the "green light" in a committee.  Reyes and Alarcon missed the vote; maybe they were setting up legal defense funds.  The entire City Council was scheduled to vote on it today, July 21, 2010, but I cannot tell from the online record whether the vote was even held, much less how it turned out.

[UPDATE ON JULY 22, 2010: THE CITY COUNCIL APPROVED IT.]

That this moronic concept even made it out of the CRA, however, tells you how desperately we need to elect, to City Council, people who have actually lived in the real world. We need people who understand that it is wrong, wrong, wrong to tax struggling families to fund subsidies for business owners.  

If the owner of a convenience store wants investors for his business, let him sell an ownership interest or take out a loan. Don't force taxpayers to pick up the tab for his capital improvements.