I now there are always extenuating circumstances, but..
Here’s the thing — Kansas city hired a consulting firm to tell them what was wrong with their parking downtown. The results, received in January of 2012, told them that their current rules weren’t being enforced and they needed more enforcement staff.
This month, the local merchants started to complain that there weren’t enough parking spaces because people were parking their cars and staying all day. There’s a great picture here of a lonely enforcement officer writing a ticket in KC.
Of course there were people who don’t want the rules enforced, but the only ones they could find lived in the area and surprise surprise they didn’t want to have to pay to park their cars on street. Could it be they were the ones actually causing the problem experienced by the merchants?
The city said it let the number of enforcement staff dwindle while they figured out whether or not to hire an outside firm to handle enforcement (They decided NOT, but only after the number of enforcement staff was down to 2 in an area that formerly had 6 or 8.)
I sympathize with the parking staff in KC, but surely when the saw the amount of money being lost due to the dearth of citations, they could have quickly justified additional enforcement staff. Its hard to believe that an enforcement officer can’t write enough tickets to cover his salary and the rest.
In the mean time, consider the problems faced by the merchants and the sales tax lost when folks decided to go elsewhere and shop and play where there was easy parking.
JVH
