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  Home Page » Opinion » Letters To The Editor » Parking Fee Increase Does Not Make Sense

Parking fee increase does not make sense

The proposed increase in parking fines from $6 to $12 as City Manager Ron LeBlanc proposes, or $9 as City Council proposes, seems a bit ludicrous to me, especially if the objective is to get more people downtown. What doesn’t seem to be part of the equation is all of us folks who live in the county.

Increasing the parking fines plus the removing most of the free parking lot between Seventh and Eighth streets for the transportation center does not encourage many of us county people to shop downtown when we can go to the mall or Wal-Mart or even the Farmington Mall, all of which have free parking.

If the objective is to get folks downtown to shop, I would suggest dropping the cost on the Main Avenue meters and increasing the time on the meters to at least three hours. Better yet would be to increase free parking to replace the money lost on the transportation center. It seems silly to me that the city wants to increase downtown shopping, but wants people to pay for the privilege.

As for free trolley service, surely a 50-cent or 75-cent charge is not over the top. People spend more than that on a cup of coffee.

Granted, if people supported public transportation, parking would not be an issue, but the reality is that neither Durango nor the county really have much more than a basic system that is not anywhere close to the level of convenience that would engender people to ride instead of drive.

As a closing thought, it seems funny that LeBlanc comes here from Ketchum, Idaho, a town that has no parking meters at all. I think he needs to be more creative than that.

Oh, and another thing, Ketchum/Sun Valley has a very convenient and user-friendly bus system that has newer buses and is free and obviously not subsidized from parking fines.

Ed Lehner, Durango