By Michael Levine
It starts with a parking meter.
Shown here is a parking meter on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood—one of the most expensive commercial districts in America—in June 2026.
It is filthy not just dusty. Grossly filthy! The kind of grime that accumulates when nobody cares. Even worse, it doesn’t work.
Now, before someone shrugs and says, “It’s only a parking meter,” let me remind you of something.
Broken windows are never about windows.
They are about neglect. They are about standards. They are about the message government sends when the smallest details are allowed to rot in plain sight.
This isn’t some forgotten alley in an abandoned industrial park. This is Brentwood. If the City of Los Angeles can’t maintain a parking meter there, what confidence should anyone have that it’s managing the rest of the city any better?
Responsibility for parking meter operations ultimately falls under the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. The department is led by General Manager Laura Rubio-Cornejo, whose base salary is approximately $395,000 a year, with additional taxpayer-funded benefits that bring her total compensation even higher.
Nearly $400,000.
For that kind of money, shouldn’t a parking meter at least work?
Government doesn’t lose public trust because of one spectacular scandal. It loses trust one broken promise, one broken sidewalk, one broken streetlight, and yes—one broken parking meter at a time.
The condition of this meter is more than an inconvenience. It is a symbol. A symbol that somewhere along the line, excellence became optional and accountability disappeared.
Here’s the question every taxpayer should ask:
If City Hall can’t keep a single parking meter clean and operational in one of Los Angeles’ premier neighborhoods, what else isn’t working that we simply haven’t noticed yet?
Michael Levine is author of Broken Windows, Broken Business. Available at BrokenWindowsBook.com.
