Note to the Escondido City Council majority: Conservatives believe in small government.

Which seems self-evident (at least to conservatives), until you try to square the council's oft-claimed conservative bona fides with their proposed overnight parking ban, which sure seems to be a case of getting the government off people's backs and into their back seats.

For all the talk of beautifying the city and/or getting illegals out of town, the reality is that the proposed parking ban is a ridiculous parade of contradictions, double talk and unanswered questions.

On one hand, the council majority tells us that the city can't legally dictate how many people can live in a house or apartment (although methinks the state and local fire codes would have some say on that point).

But if that's true, then you also can't dictate how many vehicles can be legally registered to the residents of a house or apartment. And as the council members have said, the city might be obliged to issue permits for any legal, registered vehicles that won't fit in a garage or driveway, the reality is likely to be that very few of the vehicles now parked on the street are going anywhere. They'll just have another sticker in the windshield.

Besides, if most of the vehicles are the result - as the council majority assures us - of illegal immigrants living too many to a house or apartment and parking their vehicles on the street, then won't those vehicles be unregistered? Illegal immigrants can't register a vehicle. Last time I checked, the city already has the authority to impound unregistered vehicles.

If the illegal immigrants theory proves wrong, and instead we simply have the reality that the Southern California real estate market has gotten so expensive that families now must share large houses to cut costs, and if children are living at home well into their 20s because they can't afford to move out, then all the city will have accomplished with the proposed parking ban is to have created an expensive new bureaucracy to issue annual parking permits to U.S. citizens for their legally registered vehicles.

This is Ronald Reagan's legacy?

Of course, we don't know the answers to any of the above questions because the city hasn't done any studies on the issue of overnight street parking. None. We have no idea how many cars park on the streets overnight, who they belong to, or how many would be impacted by the proposed ban. Nor do we know how many garages have been converted illegally to bedrooms - although here the city is doing some good work with its code enforcement sweeps.

And City Councilman Sam Abed assures us we don't even need any studies - his eyeballs are all the evidence we need to know both that there's a problem and that a parking ban will fix it.

Sigh.

If a bloated, useless government bureaucracy is to be her political calling card to higher office, perhaps Councilwoman Marie Waldron should run in the Democratic primary next time.

- Contact columnist Jim Trageser, an Escondido resident, at (760) 631-6628 or jtrageser@nctimes.com.

Related stories:

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/05/27/news/inland/21_45_525_26_07.txt