Whistler lawmakers this week responded to overwhelming public pressure in a way elected officials often do when faced with resistance to previously agreed-upon solutions: Defer, postpone, delay.
In a sense, you could say they knuckled under to the pressure on pay parking at the Conference Centre underground lot by adopting Councillor Grant Lamont’s motions on the issue. But they left little doubt that pay parking in one form or another is still the preferred long-term solution for the Conference Centre parkade and many — perhaps eventually all — of Whistler’s other public lots.
If nothing else, Tuesday’s decisions served as acknowledgement of current economic realities for local residents and businesses, and of the fact that while the reasoning behind this past spring’s decision to implement pay parking may have been sound, the measure was poorly timed, communicated and executed.
Lisa Landry, the municipality’s general manager of economic viability, isn’t the first person to have said during this discussion that “there’s no such thing as free parking,” or words to that effect. A transportation consultant quoted in The Question a couple of weeks ago said essentially the same thing. Someone has to pay — whether it be the taxpayer, local businesses, drivers, or a combination of the three — to build, maintain and administer the lots.
While the decision to pull back on pay parking at the Conference Centre until a comprehensive analysis is completed makes sense for the short term, we wonder how much revenue will be lost to the RMOW’s already-tight budget while the analysis is being prepared and until some form of pay parking returns.
When the measure to implement pay parking was adopted, officials estimated that money from the Conference Centre lot, and the increase from $1 to $2 an hour along Main Street, would bring in a total of $390,000 for the remainder of 2009. Because few people have been parking in the underground over the past few months, we doubt that that project would have been achieved. But for the next three months at least, even the little money that has been trickling in will be cut off. In the longer term, failing to implement pay parking in the Conference Centre and Lots 1 to 3 would cost the municipality a projected $1.2 million in 2010, $2.8 million in 2011. That’s a pretty big hit for taxpayers to take on.
Quite a few people have mentioned that in addition to implementing pay parking, the Muni needs to upgrade Whistler’s transit system if it wants to get more people out of their cars and onto buses. It’s a well-known fact that Whistler already has one of the most successful small-town transit systems in North America, but we suppose it’s always possible to raise the bar even further. Given the current economy, though, we don’t expect that that’s likely to happen in the short term, the 2010 Winter Olympic period notwithstanding.
We like the idea presented by Question reader Jinny Ladner and others — to give locals, or sell them at a reasonable cost, SmartPark meters that are kept in people’s vehicles and charge only for the time used, then offer meter users, say, a 25 per cent discount on time purchased as compared to the rate paid by others. Local residents, after all, need to be encouraged to shop in the Village, and it’s not always possible to do so by bike or bus.
But make no mistake: Whistlerites will pay more to park their cars in and around the Village in the future. The only question is how much, how soon, and how will local officials choose to mitigate the impacts on local residents and businesses.
