The Politics of Parking in a Small Town II: Villagers With Pitchforks!

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the ongoing circus of bad decisions surrounding an unfolding local "for-pay" parking situation, here in our small seaside tourist town.

While I was mostly expecting this to become little more than a temporary storm in a teacup that would pass rather quickly as locals would adapt to the parking system, it has instead turned out that quite the opposite is true… hence I felt that an update was warranted, if nothing else just to "record it."

You can go here and read Part 1 of this particular political and civic craziness!

Photo of the parking area in question, taken by me during Covid lockdown, hence it is empty

Anyway, as soon as the new paid parking lot started being enforced by the shopping center owner the outcry and protests from long-term locals reached a screaming crescendo.

There was much outrage and public gnashing of teeth, expressed in both local online forums as well as in letters to the editor of the local newspaper and protests at city council meetings. As part of this, it turned out that the system wasn't even working properly, and was even in violation of a number of state statutes concerning paid parking, even though that is still open to debate.

When I say "open to debate," what I really mean is that it's one of those issues that the resources of the California-based private equity company implementing the parking system will likely keep in litigation for seven years at a huge cost, while they continue to collect revenues from their flawed system.

But I digress.

The initial uproar was simply about the fact that a parking lot belonging to a shopping center — let's keep in mind here that this is not a free standing park-and-lock lot — went from being free (as it always has been) to costing $4.50 an hour.

Allegedly, the system was designed to give patrons of the shops in the shopping center 30 minutes for free, but it still required installing a parking app on your phone, having to enter in all your personal data (including payment information), in order to subsequently scan a QR code inside each shop in order to get your 30 free minutes.

While that might look like it could work — on paper — it's one of those things that is only marginally effective in the practical sense in that several of the tenants in the shopping center are restaurants that you definitely are not going to complete your visit with inside 30 minutes. Besides, most people visiting probably would go to three or four stores which could also not be accomplished within 30 minutes.

As one letter to the editor pointed out: "what, are we supposed to do our shopping at a store, get validated, get back in our cars, drive around the block, re-park, enter our information all over, go into a different store and repeat the process till we're done with all our shopping?"

Definitely a valid point.

But things went from a "simmer" to a "full rolling boil" when people started receiving $102.00 parking fines in the mail, creating a major uproar.

Many of these were issued simply because the parking lot cameras recorded license plate numbers, then people's names and addresses were retrieved from the State Department of Licensing and people received automated fines in the mail. Some were due to people simply not being aware that the lot was now for-pay (more about that later), some because people had followed the rules but had evidently either ended up being in the parking lot for 31 minutes or the app had simply failed to record correctly that there was a 30 minute grace period.

Things were then further complicated by the fact that the citations were issued by an administrative company in Colorado that in no way was connected to the parking lot owner who is this private equity firm in California.

But it doesn't stop there. Without a doubt part of the problem was also the fact that the signage is quite unclear, with text that is really too small to read, and it fails to meet Washington state codes for metered parking (size of lettering, signage and placement), or at least it's very marginal. The white text on a red background also fails to meet most standards for readability.

Meanwhile, the merchants — who are clearly affected by this parking situation — are doing their best to help their customers navigate the new parking system, including contesting inappropriately applied to parking citations and charges for parking that should have been free. Apparently, that is not going over well with the landlords!

Even though we are only a little over a month in, the response from the landlord parking lot owner has evidently been that they're not going to renew the leases of many of the tenants. They aren't exactly kicking these tenants out, but they have made it clear that leases will not be renewed but tenants can stay on a month-to-month basis.

This is quite ridiculous given that we're talking about — among other things — our oldest Mexican food restaurant that has been there since the 1970s, the independent pharmacy that has been there since 1961, along with our oldest independent toy store which has also been in town for 30+ years.

When this news hit the paper about a week ago, a new round of outrage arose, not surprisingly.

But wait, there's more!

To add to the stupidity of the whole situation, the US Bank — at one end of the parking lot in its own building with its own (owned) parking spaces — has been directly impacted by the situation because the property owner of the shopping center decided to put a line of immovable bollards to delineate the US bank parking lot from their parking lot, which has effectively made it all but impossible for people to use the US bank drive-thru.

Normally, you would enter the parking lot and make a wide swing through the connected parking lots to get into the drive through. With the bollards in place, bank customers now have to drive up a narrow strip of road, make a sharp U-turn to get back into the drive through lane. It's a design that might require just one forward-and-back-up if you have a small car, but if you're driving something like a pickup truck, requires maybe 3-4 adjustments to get the truck into the drive through lane... effectively making it inaccessible.

Google street view screenshot. Yellow line is where the bollards have been placed; the drive-thru lane is the small protrusion right under the letters "US."

Of course the response from the owner of the shopping center has been that they are "within their right" to put up the bollards because it's their parking lot even though there is shared pavement.

As I write these words heated arguments are going back and forth and a number of lawsuits are in the making as US Bank is — obviously — not happy about the situation.

And that's where this hornet's nest sits, right now.

From where I am sitting, this just seems like one more example of putting profit before people, and even putting profit before common sense.

More to follow, as it develops...

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All images are our own, unless otherwise attributed.
This is an AI-free post!