Parking problems prove prickly

A petition with more than 150 signatures from disgruntled motorists who received parking tickets downtown, or who have come close, reminded city administrators that their work to amend downtown parking rules will be appreciated.

Changes to the parking rules, however, aren’t likely to bring across-the-board cheers.

“There’s not a magical way to make it work for everybody,” Coeur d’Alene City Administrator Troy Tymesen said.

Tymesen met with the parking commission board this week to hash out modifications to the city’s downtown parking rules that have been in place since the 1990s.

One of its proposals is to allow motorists to return to a parking spot after three hours of parking elsewhere.

The current rule prohibits parking within 300 feet of a spot a motorist occupied earlier.

The latest hubbub is a result of more stringent enforcement of the old rules. In the past, the city didn’t field a lot of complaints. That changed when technology gave the old ordinances new teeth.

“The trigger mechanism has been the number of citations written with the new parking equipment in play,” Tymesen said.

The rules require cars parked downtown to move 300 feet from their spot every two hours. Two-hour parking is free downtown, and for decades honest motorists religiously moved their cars approximately 300 feet every two hours. Others cunningly rolled their vehicles a few feet to conceal or remove the chalk marks that were used by parking enforcement officials until last year.

“The 300-foot ordinance has been in place since the first day I trained 25 years ago,” said Fred Raap of Diamond Parking, the city’s parking lot vendor.

Until last year, Raap chalked the tires of parked cars to tell which ones overstayed the two-hour free parking rule.

“For the dishonest people it was kind of a joke. They could roll forward to cover the chalk mark, and stay there all day essentially,” Raap said.

Or, they could move across the street because, “This doesn’t have a GPS,” Raap said pointing to his head.

Then, the game changer: A recently purchased GPS car.

It tracks whether a parked vehicle has been moved far enough in a given time frame.

Motorists first get a free courtesy ticket that includes a rundown of the parking rule. After that, fines range from $15 to a $25 slug in the pocketbook.

Shane Greenfield, who works downtown, gathered signatures for the petition he presented to the parking commission from disgruntled motorists who don’t like the new enforcement. He thinks the city could adopt less ardent rules for people working downtown who need to come and go a lot from their place of work as they make deliveries or meet with clients. The city’s parking garages may be too far away, making their use cumbersome.

Greenfield proposed monthly parking passes for people in his shoes. His idea to install meters as a solution was kiboshed by parking commissioners.

“We used to have meters,” chairman Mark Rogers said. “They have a fatal flaw (because) they take away valuable customer parking all day long,” as people who get a prime parking spot continue to feed the meters.

Moving a car 300 feet every two hours resulted in having a car parked more than 900 feet away — the length of three football fields — by the end of a business day, said Marilee Wallace of the Coeur d’Alene Chamber of Commerce.

She liked the latest idea of allowing cars to return to a spot after three hours.

In its effort to relieve downtown parking, the city has offered businesses a $15 monthly parking pass for employees to use the McEuen garage and lot. Two others are being built, including a garage on Coeur d’Alene Avenue and on Northwest Boulevard near the courthouse, where Kootenai County is spending $1.3 million for a parking lot.