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The owner of a hulking pickup truck parked the thing askew on Walnut Street with the right rear wheel rolled a foot onto the sidewalk.
Some suburbanites — alien to downtown — are parallel-parking challenged. Many who stormed the area in a fast break for the Big 12 Tournament this month also didn’t think to feed the parking meters.
Parking control officers are my heroes, nailing many cars, SUVs and pickups. Parking tickets under windshield wipers fluttered poetically in the wind. I smiled. That’s justice.
The city needs to send a surge of parking officers downtown to chalk tires and write 10 times more tickets. The Sprint Arena folks and businesses in the Power & Light District may scream that the surge is bad for business, but it actually makes a lot of sense.
Here’s why. The city failed miserably when it put up the Sprint Arena and gave away the farm to open the entertainment district but didn’t provide enough parking. People who don’t want to pay parking-lot fees are rudely leaving their vehicles in no parking zones, on curbs or illegally blocking driveways and fire hydrants.
But they also are sneaking into business and residential parking lots, greedily taking the spaces of people like me who live or work downtown. Tenants are forced to fish for the few parking spaces that are a hike away. Or they are kept hostage at home, afraid to leave to get groceries or do other things for fear their parking space will be gobbled up.
Businesses have had to waste valuable staff to guard employee lots. Some of those workers have taken an earful from inebriated arena-goers.
The city’s shortsighted cost-cutting has pushed that parking expense of downtown attractions onto these unhappy few while the revenue flows into corporate hands. Let’s call it what it is — a grossly unfair tax that people who live or work downtown are paying for suburbanites to have pretty new play places.
The city needs to recruit and unleash more parking officers, plant more parking meters, extend parking meter hours to 3 a.m. and double the cost of each parking ticket. “With-it” cities do that to discourage illegal parking and to boost revenue. Call it a user fee.
Private parking lot owners should love it because such a surge would literally drive traffic to them. Older, more established entertainment offerings such as Westport, the Country Club Plaza, Brookside and 39th Street would love the parking changes downtown.
It would enable them to compete on a more equal footing for limited sports-and-nightlife crowds instead of seeing their customers stampede to the glitzy new offerings where a lot of the costs are being absorbed by others.
I like the signs in a now-vacant storefront that had been Mayor Mark Funkhouser’s campaign headquarters. They say a “city that works.” I favor that. Consider the budget cuts Funkhouser proposed recently, which included closing the Municipal Correctional Institution, consolidating airport police with the Kansas City Police Department, ending general fund support for the Kansas City Zoo, closing the Animal Shelter, reducing neighborhood service staff and cutting funds for Liberty Memorial.
The extra revenue from the city having a surge on parking violators would help make this a city that works. It would be like the sales taxes the suburbs collect from Kansas City shoppers who don’t have a lot of in-town options.
Increased parking patrols would make downtown safer and enable our town to finally get back its share of the pie.
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