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# Preferential treatment rubs the wrong way
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/preferential-treatment-rubs-wrong-way/
- Published: 2005-06-11T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T07:14:49.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Business, Montana, #archive-import

This past week, Q-line asked: Do you think preferential parking permits, traditionally only granted to residents of a neighborhood, should be extended to employees who work nearby?

Here are your responses: ✆ “Yes, I think a limited number of parking permits should be issued to employees of adjacent businesses. We need our business community to prosper, which requires that the employees get to work on time and not waste time and energy looking around for parking. Makes sense to me.” ✆ “Federal, state, county and city streets are common area for those law-abiding motorists who use them. With the exception of a few toll roads and bridges, these roadways are subsidized in one form or another by taxation by the motorists who use them. Those employees who work nearby who are driving automobiles are for certain paying a gas tax and plenty of it. Only a fool would not realize that we need these employees to do the daily grind of hard work and confront them upon entering their workplace. I do believe in carpooling for everyone when it’s feasible. Another alternative is beach parking lots, that use a shuttle along Wilshire, Santa Monica and Pico boulevards that would carry workers and anyone else who would ride the shuttle to their destination. The law is very simple: Public streets belong to all who behave while using them.” ✆ “No on any preferential parking whatsoever. It’s time to get rid of all preferential parking, period. Street parking is public parking. No person owns a public parking space. If a person owns a parking space, it is a private parking space. Public and private are not the same. Issuing preferential parking permits is essentially giving private ownership rights to a person or groups of persons to public property. A homeowner does not own the street parking spaces that are in front of his home. An apartment owner does not own the street parking spaces in front of his apartment. A business owner does not own the street parking spaces in front of his business. A school does not own the street parking spaces in front of or around its campus. They are public parking spaces — first come, first served. Now, the homeowners, apartment owners, business owners and school administrators might want to consider the availability of parking, both public and private before considering buying, leasing, renting, or expanding. Preferential parking is not the solution. The set up in administration of preferential parking just sets up a bureaucratic boondoggle providing privileges to worthless weasels. It does nothing to solve the problem. It just pushes the problem to another area, which lobbies for the privilege, which then pushes the problem to another area, until the whole city is all preferential restricted parking. This just supports another bloated bureaucracy. There is one obvious solution — it is so obvious that it would be immediately discounted. That is to sell the parking spaces to business owners or individuals. Privatizing them. Privatizing, oh horrors. What a terrible word to use in the socialist, fascist, mini-state of Santa Monica. Privatizing parking spaces would also eliminate the need for the street sweeping bureaucracy and truck. The owners of the now private parking spaces would be responsible for keeping their spaces swept and the debris placed in garbage containers, not hosed or leaf-blown. There could be similar oversight with weed abatement — but of course this would never happen in Santa Monica.” ✆ “Yes, I think it’s elementary my dear Watson that employees have parking spaces made available. Because, of course, they’re doing a service for us, so of course parking should come with the job.” ✆ “Preferential parking is just the city’s way of using public streets to benefit a few people. So they should get rid of it. If someone can afford to buy a whole bunch of cars, they can afford to pay high prices for parking. All The landlords should be required to provide a parking space for each apartment. If the person is dumb enough to fill it with junk and not their car, that’s their problem, it’s not the landlord’s problem. As far as employees they should be encouraged to take the bus or walk if it’s not that far. Some people are just so lazy they have to drive.” ✆ “Wasn’t the reason we residents needed these parking zones is because SMRR City Council sold us out to big businesses? Now they increase their hypocrisy by wanting to give businesses the few parking spaces that we tenants with permits are already fighting over.” ✆ “I think employees should be allowed, in a limited way, to park on the public street. Nobody owns the public streets, they are public property, and it’s a shame to drive around Santa Monica to see all these empty residential streets during the week and nobody on them.” ✆ “The parking situation is actually worse with restricted parking than it was without it. Another example of rent control, but with parking in its place. Nothing new to our socialist brothers and sister on the council. Along Wilshire Boulevard, Montana Avenue, and Santa Monica Boulevard, all businesses, hotels, and hospitals — I saw their employees parking on 16th and Washington — should be taxed. With that money, the city should buy as many lots for employee parking as possible from Ocean avenue to Centinela, and then maybe they could throw in a shuttle bus for workers to shuttle from the lot to their place of business. This city’s quest is to build up taxes as much as possible, but a real urban planner would never build anything without first having an infrastructure in place to handle development. How incompetent could the City Council be. Well, look at their political and economic guru Karl Marx, and you could understand their dismal failure of their five-year plan, except it’s 25 years. Parking for taxpayers is a hindrance to their ultimate plan of low-income housing, mass transit, and mass dumbing down of school district employees, which is the worst tax of all.” ✆ “Absolutely no! As a 30-year resident, I expect the city to be more concerned with providing a safe, rare parking space less than three or four blocks away from home. On my block, which is 7th Street, between Wilshire and Montana, we pay our dues seven days a week, sacrificing nearby parking to the St. Monica students, faculty, administrators, and parishioners, not to mention special events. What about the residents who wish to bring children to our neighborhood park, use the basketball court, or attend an event at Miles Playhouse? Where do they park? The employers that attract large numbers of customers for example 7-Eleven, Kinko’s and Baja Fresh are really sensitive to the employees’ needs. Why can’t they pay for monthly spots in the private lots south of Wilshire or provide free bus tokens as a tax right off. Don’t provide relief for business by creating an additional parking problem for residents. Look to the money.” ✆ “I’m on the street that has these permits, and the first thing I noticed when this thing got going was that there was no additional free space. It was exactly the same as before. When I called the agency, they said the reason was that to keep the people off these streets. It didn’t really work, and it would be kind of silly to let the employees park as that was the whole logic in allowing the permits in the first place. They should just get rid of the whole thing, or keep it as it is.”

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 11, 2005.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/061105.pdf?ref=smdp.com)