This past week, Q-line asked: Are you willing to pay more for hourly parking to fund more spaces?
Here are your responses: ✆ “It is interesting to note that beach parking lots between the Marina del Rey inlet and Sunset Boulevard remain, with the exception of the weekends, mostly vacant, even through the summer months. Some of this vacancy factor is due to the price of parking. New parking nearer to commercial businesses to facilitate transient parking does not set well with me. As it stands now, parking meters are one-armed bandits, and the bale for a parking citation is obscene and extortive. When enough is more than enough, then it is really enough.” ✆ “Well, it’s about time this city administration is about to do something constructive and forward-looking in regard to the awful parking situation in this city. Perhaps a slight increase in parking fees would be warranted, however one wonders about the real necessity of such an increase given the city’s track record for cavalier and unnecessary spending. More money down the drain? If we stop all the handouts to the increasing vagrant population, we would have quite a useable sum of money for these projects.” ✆ “Yes, I think it’s fine to collect more money for hourly parking, because Santa Monica is a world-renowned place. So yes, let’s get it out of the cars that come here to park.” ✆ “Years ago, the mall merchants paid for the parking structure servicing the mall. Parking was free. Now, it costs to park and City Hall wants us to buy the properties on Fourth Street — an expensive area — and pay for the new parking structures. Why not assess the mall merchants, because they’re not making enough money as it is now? Then, how about if we assess the buildings and properties in the new Santa Monica Place — a train wreck waiting to happen after City Hall adds all of its recommendations? And the reason why we can’t do that is because of all the low-income housing — you won’t get much tax revenue out of them. How about the businesses on Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards or the hotels on Second Street? They provide little parking for customers and hardly any for employees. So the consequences are that we have restricted parking on both sides of Wilshire, and which, if we are lucky, we can park for $30 a year two blocks from our homes. Who’s responsible for this mess? It’s not someone making $100,000 a year in the plan-ning department. No, it’s our progressive city council, who finds it way easier to tax people than to solve the problems that they initiated.” ✆ “I am not willing to pay any more money for parking downtown, or to fund more parking garages. The city has millions of dollars in a redevelopment agency that’s supposed to be used for redeveloping downtown. They should use the redevelopment money to build the parking garages and give the taxpayers of Santa Monica a break.” ✆ “If they didn’t keep building all these high-rises, they wouldn’t have such a parking problem. One other way would be to make the landlords provide parking for all their tenants, since Santa Monica likes to force the landlords to do everything else, they might as well do something useful. If an apartment has three or four cars, there should be a limit. Let them have a certain amount of parking spaces in the building, and after that they have to buy parking permits. If there is more than one car, then they need to pay double for each permit. If they have three cars, then they should pay triple the cost for each permit. That would be one way. They can stop people from driving to Santa Monica all the time — they can take the bus or walk. I haven’t driven into Santa Monica in years because it’s impossible to park. They don’t need more parking buildings, it’ll just be another place for the bums to use the bathroom in the stairways.” ✆ “Pay more for parking? No way. If the businesses need more for parking, let them subsidize it.” ✆ “In one word, the answer is ‘no.’ No new taxes, no new fees. If the city can’t afford to build it, don’t build it. Stay within the budget as is.” ✆ “No, I do not want to pay more for my hourly parking to fund more parking spaces. I think the city mismanages the money that they have; we have a very wealthy city and they come up with all these harebrained ideas or schemes that they want to get funded when they ignore the basic services that all our citizens deserve. We pay our taxes and we pay more, and we pay more and more. I am fed up with it. City Hall, pay attention, we will vote you out.” ✆ “Since Santa Monica’s Renters Rights has taken over our city, they have sold out renters to commercial development. As you know, most Santa Monica residents don’t shop downtown or on Main Street. Why should we locals suffer from higher parking prices around town to support a giant tourist trap that none of us wanted? Tax the downtown businesses, or let them build their own damn parking.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 21, 2005. Read the original PDF.