The solution: fiddle at the edges, and when in doubt, study
Pay parking may indeed be a great idea for West Vancouver. Mayor and council have made it a terrible one.
No matter how they keep fiddling and digging, they can’t see the basic sense in pausing the program until they can figure out how it might make sense without hurting local businesses. Instead, they will keep trying to thread the needle with their eyes closed.
On Monday night, yet another swing and miss–only this one was a real insult to the community. A scheme was concocted so that most councillors only saw it a couple of hours before the meeting, put on the agenda with no notice to the public, promised by the mayor as a new recipe to satisfy, but clearly served from the oven half-baked.
What probably would have been wise for council to discuss in-camera was instead an on-camera fiasco (it starts around 2:10 and runs until about 3:03 on the video). The business owners in attendance were gasping, groaning and giggling as the escapade unfurled in one giant improv session. An amendment was expanded and appended and crafted on the fly, and dictated and wordsmithed and edited to a staff member to input on a keyboard, so we could see what they were thinking and reconsidering and revising ad nauseum, until they at last reached grudging, exhausted, resigned agreement.
And the agreement was to. . .study the situation! Find best practices! In time for. . .next year!
This dawning of project management, at last, comes two years into the exercise, and the first summer in which pay parking has come to bustling Ambleside Park, adjacent to a fragile local business district featuring free term parking. Of all the places to mess with, this is the worst. Given there is next to no parking enforcement, motorists are often choosing to park free for hours and impeding access to local enterprise. Whatever revenue is being generated by pay parking is, the businesses argue credibly, minor compared to their losses as cars hog the storefronts.
As half-measures, the District decided in its drawn-out discussion Monday to permit 90 minutes of free parking in Ambleside Park to try to mitigate the free parking in front of Ambleside businesses. It will post signs to encourage visitors to support local commerce. It will interview (this week, we were told) and hire by-law officers. It will kick the can down the road to 2027.
And oh yes, let’s not forget, it will subject local enterprise to the painful effects of a problematic plan. Their losses will be part of a case study for a consultant. Ironically, the study on what’s hurting business will be financed by pay parking revenue.
This was mayor and council’s last likely opportunity pause the program for the busy beach summer to properly reset, and it instead persisted. The inability to concede a mistake, much less apologize, is a habit of an administration also allergic to consultation. It didn’t see the value before it changed the very culture of free-parking WestVan to take time to consult, to ask and learn from others, and to stop when everyone could see it wasn’t working. Poor planning, process and practice have turned a genuine revenue opportunity into a genuine shambles.
You might recall that our Charter of Rights and Freedoms was written, in part, on the back of a napkin, in the so-called Kitchen Accord. West Vancouver mayor and council tried to replicate this episode of history Monday, only with different results.
The shame is that there are many solutions other municipalities long ago discovered that build buy-in from the community and protect business. A good parking plan does more than raise money. Done well, it becomes a parking management, village-support and park-investment tool.
I suppose it will have to wait for the next mayor and council.