Despite their building being located downtown and having employees who are constantly being ticketed, the Keene Sentinel continues to support the city’s parking monopoly, in a lengthy Sunday piece by Casey Farrar. In it, she discusses the history of parking meters in Keene and makes excuses for why they are supposedly necessary.
If parking meters are supposed to keep the downtown parking “fluid”, especially at busy times, then why does the city allow an entire week of free parking during the peak of the holiday shopping season in December? By their supposed reasoning, wouldn’t that be the best time to ensure compliance by cracking down? Instead, they take the week off! Things that make you go hmm. Anyway, here’s the Sentinel’s propaganda piece, which while supposedly written by Casey Farrar, uses the term “we”, as though it is an editorial from the editorial staff. Who really wrote this?:
Anti-government types, with coins in hand, have been gleefully keeping a step ahead of city parking attendants looking for expired meters. They’ve gotten thumbs-ups from those they’ve saved from a $5 ticket, and drawn ire from City Hall, which added a fresh element to the subject last week.
Officials petitioned the court to keep six members of the group at a distance from city workers writing tickets for expired meters, claiming harassment.
The story caught on in the national media and sparked debate among local residents. In the process, it’s also brought attention to how Keene helps finance its public parking.We’ll leave it to the courts to decide the harassment complaint, and, instead, will stick to the subject of parking meters. Despite the apparent simplicity of the protest, these devices have not one, but two, purposes, the second of which has gone generally unmentioned in the current controversy.
The principal purpose of parking meters is to generate income to help the city maintain public parking. The money raised from parking meters and the fines for violations is kept in a fund separate from the city’s general operating fund. At the end of 2012, the parking fund had $670,000, city officials recently said.
Of the 1,388 public parking spaces in the city, 880 are metered. Metering in the city dates back to the 1940s, when an influx of automobile traffic raised the question of what to do with all the cars when people wanted to walk around the city or go into shops, according to a presentation last month by Keene Planning Director Rhett Lamb and City Manager John MacLean for the City Council’s municipal services, finance and infrastructure committee.In 1946, Mayor James Farmer announced at his inauguration that new meters would be installed and the next year more than 200 were placed on Main Street as a trial. The revenue from the meters paid off the trial in two years, and the rest of the earnings went to pay for maintaining roads and bridges. At the time, metered parking cost 5 cents per hour, with a $1 fine for violators, and helped ease the haphazard way parking was dealt with. It also assured a steady flow of vehicle turnover in the city throughout the day.
By the mid-1950s, meters were installed on both sides of Main Street and along the center strip. They’ve long been a controversial part of Keene’s landscape. At times, business owners claimed they discouraged downtown traffic, and of course there’s the grumbles from those slapped with a $5 fine for arriving a couple of minutes late.
In response, city officials have experimented with the placement of meters in different areas of the city. From 1985 to 1986, all the meters were even shut down for a time, but business owners asked for them to be brought back to increase parking turnover, which dropped off with the elimination of time limits on parking spaces, city officials said.
Revenue from the metered parking spaces helped pay for the addition of public off-street parking lots in the 1970s and 1980s, such as those on Gilbo Avenue and Elm Street. The city’s two above-ground parking decks were built with a combination of parking revenue and money raised through a Tax Increment Finance District.
Now, with development in the heart of the city growing and downtown storefronts filled, city officials are again pondering whether another multi-level parking structure is needed to keep up with demand.
Given the anti-tax leanings of the parking meter protesters, one would imagine that the user-fee concept that’s inherent in Keene’s pay-for-parking set up would have some appeal. Without that, taxpayer dollars would be used to maintain parking used by only those who park downtown.
But, as noted above, parking meters have another purpose that has nothing to do with revenue, particularly in the heart of the downtown. Parking meters there help keep spaces fluid — that is, their timing mechanism and the underlying threat of fines encourage drivers to stop, shop or dine, and then move on so that other drivers can use the same spot, one after the other.
That arrangement makes sense, so long as the fee and fine levels are reasonable, as they are in Keene. Certainly the current setup (yes, including the tickets) makes more sense than doing away with meters altogether, a step that would assure that spaces never opened up, and that the downtown’s vitality would be seriously compromised.
