The second most interesting item of the night was Item 32: Paid Parking in the City Parks.
This came from the Parks and Rec Board as a recommendation. It was basically swatted down hard. The conversation was handled very well.
First off, everyone was against charging in Rio Vista parks. There’s barely any parking there already. It would push cars to park in the neighborhood. So the conversation was quickly restricted to the parking lots right by the Lion’s Club.
Second, everyone was strongly against charging residents to park there. It was basically just a conversation about whether or not to charge tourists to park.
Jane Hughson made all the sane points against this:
- it would be a giant mess to implement a city parking permit program and get the word out to residents. Residents would constantly be showing up and either get charged or turned away to do some paperwork, or their pass would be in their other car, or they’d be riding in the car with their out-of-town guest, and so on. A million headaches.
- Furthermore, it’s not even clear that we have enough of a tourist industry to pay for the headaches caused.
Melissa Derrick made the best points in favor, namely that the river is overused and we risk eating our own tail if we can’t find a way to protect it. Many cities with important natural resources seem to use a permit system just fine, like Florida beach towns or whatever. Why can’t we?
I hear what she’s saying, but somehow there’s a much steeper obstacle here in terms of awareness. Maybe just because every Florida beach town grapples with that same issue, and here it’s spotty. But it would be a huge mess.
Hughson puts a plug in for us to charge for football parking, though. That seems like low-hanging fruit.
The San Marxist 