The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
City council appears to be deeply conflicted on the issue of enforcing time limits on downtown parking. On the one hand, they go through all the trouble and provincial expense of seeking permission to slap a fresh (though extremely modest) tax onto core businesses in order to fund a parking enforcement officer. But on the other hand, when their request is summarily denied, council refuses to pony up the roughly $830 per month required to simply pay for their own enforcement. I don't get it. And in its its recent ruling rejecting council's controversial taxation plan, the Manitoba Municipal Board didn't get it, either. Pulling no punches, the ruling stated that the city failed to provide a rationale as to why it will not dip into its present budget to fund the very modest price tag involved. "The board does not know whether the reason is that council does not believe that parking on Main Street is a problem," the ruling said. "If that is the case, the board questions why council is seeking approval of the (plan). If it is a budgetary matter, the board finds it difficult to understand why council would find that just over $13,000 over 16 months is too onerous an amount for a measure that could contribute to the well being of the city's commercial centre." If council sees no merit in enforcing the very time limits they have put in place, then they should never have bothered with the Municipal Board. They should simply tear down their time-limit signage and declare their own bylaw meaningless. If, however, council is interested in ensuring compliance with the law, and believes that downtown parking abuse is a problem, then they need to set aside that 0.1 per cent of their annual budget and again hire a part-time enforcement officer. In fairness, it was members of the downtown business community Ð not council Ð that brought forth the notion of taxing downtown stores to pay for the proposed officer. But that was only after a majority of council dismissed the idea of paying for the officer with current revenues, again for reasons that have never been made entirely clear in public. Parking abuse has been a perceived problem on Main Street for years Ð decades, in fact. The Reminder has been printing articles on this dilemma as far back as the 1940s. This will perhaps always be an issue to some degree, but the city is not helpless here. Enforcement would reduce parking abuse, just as it has in the past, and help keep our downtown businesses healthy. Either council sees parking enforcement as a step that would help Main Street Ð and by extension our entire city Ð or they do not. If it's the former, they now need to pay for enforcement on their own. If it's the latter, then they just need to just say so already. Local Angle runs Fridays.
