CITY HALL IGNORES CONSULTANT'S PARKING RECOMMENDATIONS

Good evening Regina!

CITY HALL IGNORES CONSULTANT'S PARKING RECOMMENDATIONS

UPDATE: It turns out this report has never actually made it to City Council, let alone the public's eye. It was only because of a Freedom of Information Request by the Regina Leader Post that this report is even available for the public to now view. (As of April 2015) This is a very unfortunate situation, and one that needs to be addressed. Surprisingly, no other media outlet has touched this story yet. The City's public response to this has been that there are a lot of "administrative" tasks included in the report. If you take a read yourself, you will see this is certainly not the case.

In recent months, the City of Regina has become famous for it's overly strict parking enforcement, and in recent years, has made moves that has made the Downtown a parking nightmare. It has gotten so bad, in fact, the metered parking use has dwindled by a whopping 30% since the new rates went into effect.

Speaking of new rates, did you know? Your tax dollars (125,000 of them in fact) went out to a consulting company in 2013 with the sole purpose of studying Regina's parking and making recommendations on how to make it more palatable.

Well, it turns out that someone at City Hall didn't feel this report was worth the paper it is written on, because the City has chosen to do things their own way anyways - $125,000 report be damned. Sadly, this isn't a shocker, because it happens more often than we would like to believe.

One of the recommendations was to increase meter rates to $2/hr. But wait - isn't that what they did? Yes! However, the consultants recommended some very key upgrades to our parking infrastructure long before that was to be implemented. They recommended the new rate go into effect sometime between 2015-2017. Only AFTER off street parking is addressed to give more capacity for those that work or live downtown.

If you think this is atrocious - just wait! In the next while, I will be posting about more items of note that the City really ought to have done months upon months ago. 

STAY TUNED!