$2.6 Million in Taxpayer Funds for a SAFE Program?

Are you familiar with the San Diego Service Authority for Freeway Emergencies board? Until recently, I hadn’t been, either. It took a “Watchdog” report in The San Diego Union-Tribune to bring to light yet another government-born-and-bred program that has long outlived its need for existence.

In this example, we have an agency that collects $2.6 million per year from San Diego County motorists via registration fees. The original intent of the funding was to install and maintain emergency phone call boxes along our freeways, which connect to “511” for safety information.

Mission accomplished. A noble and worthy project perhaps when first launched, but with the proliferation of cell phones, the “SAFE” program should for all intents and purposes be allowed to go the way of its public pay-phone cousins and drift into the Smithsonian as a historical piece of Americana mass communication. 

Not so fast there, cowboy! Even as calls from the roadside phones have decreased every year to the point of being mere noise now from a statistical perspective, SAFE continues to fight for its survival by means of yet another marketing campaign.  The latest life jacket will cost $130,000 in taxpayer money and will include the following “promotions” (prizes included) which in SAFE’s warped sense of being correlate to “emergency services:”

~A cookbook designed with “on the go” people in mind. It will help the public by educating them to use Tupperware and Igloo coolers when transporting food in their vehicle. Really.

~Targeting April Fool’s Day, SAFE would like photos of cars that you have pranked. I shudder to think how SAFE would define the word “pranked”, though the ad campaign cautions the participants: “only legal pranks, please.”

All this in a feeble attempt to drive traffic (pun intended) to the agency’s website, increase public awareness of SAFE’s existence, and most importantly, lobby for continued taxpayer life support. Considering SAFE, by its own admission, currently maintains fewer than 200 Twitter followers, three dozen Facebook “fans” (likely employee friends and family) and approximately 50 website visits per week, I suppose even a four-leaf clover marketing campaign such as this latest one might yet lead to another year’s pot of tax-funding gold!

Unfortunately, two San Diego County Supervisors, Ron Roberts and Bill Horn, both of whom are SAFE board members, continue to support not only SAFE’s existence, but the ad campaigns as well. Said Horn: “In my opinion, letting drivers know that the mobile call-box program exists creates a safer highway system for our region, but we need to be doing that as efficiently as we can.”

Call me a skeptic, but I’d like some tangible evidence that the “mobile call-box program creates a safer highway system.”  If Mr. Horn or any SAFE advocate can provide me such supporting documentation, I’ll gladly award them a cook book from my buddy, Sam The Cooking Guy!

Enough of this nonsense already! Extinguish SAFE permanently and in turn reduce our auto registration fees. The public will never notice, since they don’t even know of SAFE’s existence in the first place!