tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6128936555178483803.post-60656669101994625692008-06-13T12:17:00.005-05:002008-06-13T13:15:03.170-05:00Sometimes we forget about unintended consequences, and typically it is to our detriment. Dogtown's city council is about to discover exactly what those consequences are and how detrimental good intentions can sometimes be. According to today's Arkansas Democrat some of the aldermen are pushing to give residents the opportunity to establish block by block parking districts. They are pursuing this in response to complaints from residents about insensitive jerks who are less than neighborly in their parking habits. Referring to parking problems, the paper quotes one Alderman as saying, " I hear from the same people on the same streets all the time."<br /><br /><br /><br />According to the paper, complete blocks or groups of contiguous blocks could band together and with a 2/3rds vote enact their own little parking district. Sounds good, right? Democracy in action.<br /><br /><br /><br />Lets look a little further.<br /><br /><br /><br />Does the 2/3rds vote required refer to residents living on the street? Those old enough to drive? Or to vote? Home owners only? Renters included? One vote per household, or is it one per resident? Is it by amount of property owned? (So one big lot could trump two or three smaller ones?) How often can you hold the "elections"? What if one family, or person who cast the vote that put the district over the top, moved? Could we be holding these elections every time someone new moves into a neighborhood? Who makes sure only qualified voters are casting their ballots and who certifies the results? It sounds like a nightmare.<br /><br /><br /><br />Lets say the voting issues are taken care of, and every block in the city can now decide its own parking regulations. Every district will have to have signs posted to inform everyone of the rules. The last time I drove through Argenta and looked, their small restricted resident parking area required about four signs per block. Expanding this city wide will prove to be a huge expense for the city, which of course will not charge residents for the signs, the installation, the removal, the updates, and reinstallation and re-removal of signs as the winds of parking wishes change for every block in the city. Signs aren't cheap. Installation, maintenance, and removal are even more expensive. What a huge financial burden to dump on the city at this time. Better raise rates again to pay for this one.<br /><br /><br /><br />Lets say the city has bitten the costly financial bullet and made the signs (different ones for each parking district since there will be different desires in each district), sunk the poles in concrete for all the signs on each block (make sure if you support this that you volunteer to have a sign erected in your yard because a lot of people don't appreciate signs, poles, concrete in their yard/gardens), and erected the signs all across the city. {Lets take a moment and reflect on the beauty of four new signs per block across the city listing the parking regulations for each particular block....my, how beautiful....almost Springdale-like. Good thing the council put in all that work on the Sign Ordinance so we could use that now-empty airspace to stop that one bad neighbor from parking how we don't want him too.} Now comes the best part....enforcement.<br /><br /><br /><br />If the city's Code Enforcement Dept is charged with enforcing the myriad of parking regulations, you can count on nothing being done in the evenings and on weekends. They work regular hours and will not be in your neighborhood ticketing neer-do-wells in the evenings and on weekends, when is probably the time when most crappy parking is done.<br /><br /><br /><br />If the Police Dept is charged with writing the tickets and towing folks you should perhaps look to Argenta, with its restricted parking currently in place, to see how the enforcement is working down there. Try driving 8th Street in Argenta and around that neighborhood some evening and see how many folks are still parking in their yards, on the sidewalks, over the curbs, or otherwise illegally. Do an FOI request and see how many tickets are being written and how many cars are being towed. I believe you will find there is no enforcement downtown about yard-parking or sidewalk blocking. If the activist folks in Argenta cannot get enforcement of their restricted areas (both the Dickey-Stephens area and the regulations of the Historic District) what chance in hell do the folks in Levy or Rose City have, where police officers actually have a lot more "real" enforcement issues to take care of? The answer is....none.<br /><br /><br /><br />The last time I looked, parking on the sidewalk was already illegal, abandoned vehicles were covered by existing statutes, and commercial vehicle parking in residential neighborhoods was already prohibited. If those problems are persisting, perhaps enforcement rather than new regulation should be looked at. If the Aldermen think they are getting calls now, just wait until all the calls about the elections, the sign locations, and the fact that bad neighbors are still parking poorly start coming in.<br /><br /><br /><br />Looks like this well-intentioned bit of legislation will be a logistical nightmare, a failure of great fiscal expense, and the ugliest esthetic development for our city since the installation of the first billboard. Unless, of course, you want your neighborhood to look like Highway 71 in Springdale.Ednahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09184413284834839859noreply@blogger.com