Let’s celebrate July 1 as ‘Pay Parking Day’ in Wichita from now on | Opinion
Well, today is the first official day of the implementation of widespread paid parking for downtown Wichita.
Can you feel the excitement?
City Hall is certainly enthusiastic.
They’ve even got a big ad on Facebook screaming “BOGO! Buy One Get One. Paid parking in downtown starts JULY 1,” the ad enthuses. “Get ready by downloading a parking app and SAVE!”
Wow. I’m totally into saving money. Especially on something that I got for free yesterday.
Something tells me that the folks at City Hall would be somewhat less enthusiastic if they had to pay for their parking.
They don’t.
“Like many other employers downtown, the City offers free surface parking and slightly subsidized garage parking as an employee benefit,” city staff wrote in an e mail response to a question I asked at the mayor’s press briefing on Thursday.
I guess they weren’t listening, the hundreds of times that Assistant City Manager Troy Anderson told the community “Free parking is not free.”
The “slightly subsidized” monthly rate for employees to park in the City Hall garage is $20 a month.
That’s exactly half as much as the city will charge ordinary residents for a monthly garage permit, and that’s at one — and only one — garage, at 121 S. Emporia.
The others city parking garages are $50 a month, with the exception of the Drury Plaza garage, which is $51 for some strange reason.
It also costs $50 a month for the surface lot on the north side of the Epic Center across the street from City Hall at Third and Main. The cheapest monthly charge for surface parking $20, is at First and Waco, a lot conveniently located near practically nothing.
This whole paid parking thing wouldn’t sting so bad if it wasn’t based on gross misrepresentations by city staff and collusion between city government and downtown developers.
First, we were told paid parking is necessary because the parking maintenance fund was being depleted year after year.
But the numbers showed it was actually turning a slight profit, except for the two COVID-19 years, when businesses were restricted or shut down and hardly anybody was parking downtown.
And then it came to light that because of a secret handshake deal about 25 years ago, the city had undercharged Old Town developers and businesses for their parking by $532,000 a year.
That $13 million, with interest, would likely have been plenty to take care of downtown garages via ongoing maintenance, instead of the $19 million or so in deferred maintenance City Hall now claims it needs to catch up on.
In the next few years, the lion’s share of paid parking income will go to pay for meters and fees to the The Car Park, the Boise, Idaho company the city’s hired to run the machines and write the parking tickets.
But on the bright side, the hope is that one day the parking fees you pay will generate enough revenue to create more slush funds to subsidize more downtown developers and their projects.
With that in mind, I propose a city proclamation designating July 1 as “Pay Parking Day” from now on.
City Hall broke the parking system, and we’ll have to pay to fix it. May as well rejoice. We have no choice.
