The new white lines you see on the outskirts of downtown are for parking meter expansion. Soon it may cost $1 an hour to park in your neighborhood on Saturdays to pay for parking garage renovations, although garages cost only 50 cents per hour and are free on Saturdays. If this makes no sense to you, ask for an explanation from Byron Champlin, the chairman of the Parking Committee. You don’t have to vote for him if you don’t like his answer.
Seems like the big review of downtown parking a few years back recommended that spots on Main Street should be higher-priced to encourage longer-term users to walk in, and Saturday and weekend parking hours would be free except on Main Street. But a midnight deal made everything the same, with parking to be expanded every time the garages needed more money instead of increasing garage rates.
City officials like to claim that downtown is an economic engine that drives the city’s prosperity, but if that was true it wouldn’t need subsidies from elsewhere. It’s more like a black hole that sucks money from the rest of the city with many properties assessed below their value and property taxes diverted to TIF districts. It’s time for that to end.
ROY SCHWEIKER
Concord