(Un)Free The Parking

I drew babysitting duty last night so I couldn't make it out to debate between candidates for the five at-large city council seats, and I was very disappointed when I found out the local cable company wasn't covering it.

Seriously, I was. There must be something wrong with me.

Anyway, I read Stephen Tait's recap this morning. I couldn't find anything too surprising. The whole dysfunctional thing is a big non-starter for me. First, I don't think it's fair--but I am new to town. Second, it's all part of the grand plan of checks and balances.

My eyes perked up (can they do that?) at one small item that came up for discussion: paid parking. I was happy to hear this was on the table once again.

Why exactly aren't we paying for parking downtown?

The city's finances are tight. The downtown's infrastructure isn't getting any younger. It's been more than 30 years of wear and tear on a lot of the downtown. Shouldn't we be preparing for repairs? Or are we going to shoot for a debt exclusion override after things really start to crumble?

Yet people still seem to see free parking downtown as one of their inalienable rights. Even though--as some point out--there is no such thing as free parking since free parking draws more cars, which cause more wear and tear on the streets, contribute to traffic, bring more problems, so-on, etc. Free parking means more people will drive downtown when they might have walked or ridden a bike. (Full disclosure, I work downtown and typically walk or ride my bike. I live a mile from downtown. I might drive once a week to make an early appointment.)

I'm sure some will cast this as some new tax or an unfair fee. But honestly I can't understand how we're comfortable with requiring kids (or their parents) to pay user fees to play school-affiliated sports and programs but we're not equally comfortable with paying our own user fee to park downtown. This isn't a tax. It's a fee that you choose to pay, and the money should go toward maintaining the infrastructure that delivers the service to you.

I think a parking could be priced reasonably, and I'm all for providing some protection for the elderly on fixed incomes. Also, we could cook up some solutions for employees working downtown. Perhaps they could park in the bank parking lots off hours? Or the property owner downtown--I mean property OWNERS--downtown could buy an allotted amount of space in a parking garage if we ever did build one.

But it seems to me we're missing an opportunity by not charging a reasonable rate to park downtown, particularly during the summer months and weekends when we've got visitors. I think we ought to hear from all our candidates on this subject, and maybe there was more said last night than what was reported in the paper. If so, feel free to enlighten with a comment to this post.