Park Place

It’s hard to get the full flavor of the Spa City’s parking debate unless you’ve once endeavored to dance upon a wet rooftop holding aloft a 15-foot metal rod amid the fury of an early spring lighting storm. Needless to say, the experience is about as electrifying as the local conversation stirred by something as seemingly mundane as a collection of lines painted on a stretch of pavement.

During its previous incarnations, the debate focused almost solely upon building immense concrete parking garages and securing more tracts of asphalt to prevent chubby city consumers from walking three or four blocks to their destination. Forcing these little pork chops to do this –say during an early spring lighting storm –might scare them into taking a traffic-filled journey to the paved paradise of Wilton. Pretty soon, the downtown shops would shutter, the lights on Broadway would dim and the criminal element would move in.

So for nearly a decade, the impetus in the city was to pave just about every patch of downtown not impeded by buildings and to construct massive multi-million dollar poured concrete structures to add a handful of spaces to the waning inventory. This carried on fine up until the second and last of these behemoths was completed in 2005. By that time, the City Council was poised to fall to the Democrats, who decided it was better to fight among themselves rather than finding new ways to shoehorn parking spaces into areas where they have no business existing in the first place.

This is all ancient history now. Today, the parking debate has nothing to do with bringing more cars in. Rather, it’s focused on how to squeeze dollars from the same lazy drivers who insist walking two or three blocks is overrated and potentially bad for the economy.

Ask any pundit in city government at this point and they’ll tell you that paid parking is more of a certainty than it is a debate. Mayor Scott Johnson mentioned it in his state of the city address, and didn’t get any biting response from the city Democrats, who literally relish the thought of tearing the Republican a new orifice in his posterior. After all, they need to support paid parking. It’s the only way Ron Kim, their sole voice on the council, will get the new public safety facility he’s pined for since his first term.

All of the proposals for a new facility include a paid parking component. Some are more creative than others, but all of them include sections of downtown that will be dedicated to those who don’t mind throwing a fiver down for several hours. In other words, get ready to feed the meter Saratoga.

Unfortunately, this whole concept of paid parking is inherently flawed, as other state and regional agencies have shown. Once the beast of paid parking is unleashed downtown, the city will be creating something that will one day grow far bigger than anyone could have ever envisioned.

The first step is simple: put a gate and a parking attendant in front of a few choice lots and watch the ducats role in. This cash will initially be used for its intended purpose to fund the behemoth police and courts building. But as the building’s maintenance costs rise, so will the city’s thirst to establish an increasing number of paid parking spaces throughout the land. Pretty soon, all of the spaces downtown will be paid.

Yet such a plan would surely need a permitting system, which would obviously require some sort an administrator. And this administrator will need an office in the new public safety building. The tedium of answering calls at the office will require an administrative secretary. After awhile, the administrator would need an assistant to help out the finer tuning of the whole system.

However, the administrator, the assistant and the secretary will be wholly unprepared to audit the whole bureaucracy. In steps the private auditor, who will cook the books and find that the parking system isn’t nearly as efficient with its collections and maintenance. He or she will suggest a new computer mainframe to oversee the system, taking some of the stress of the administrator and assistant; individual Blackberries for parking attendants so they can expediently upload fines to the aforementioned mainframe; and Segways for parking enforcement officers, so they agree to the new union contract.

Pretty soon, the collection of parking fees will go to feed the growing beast. When or if revenues decline, the beast will growl and parking fees will increase. Is this far-fetched? Perhaps. But so was the concept of collecting tolls to the state legislators who created the Thruway Authority in 1949. They originally though the public benefit corporation would dissolve once the towering cost of the superhighway was paid in full.

Well, that day came and went more than a decade ago. And since that time, the Thruway Authority has continued to take tolls. Worse yet, they continue to raise them unabated.

This is what can happen when artificial revenue streams are created to fund bloated projects. Of course, not many would argue against building the Thruway retrospectively. At least that structure has the ability to generate commerce. The only things a towering new public safety facility will generate –and the new paid parking system by extension –are more ways for a ballooning justice system to levy tax-like fines on the general public.