I was at a shop in St. Paul recently where I overheard a woman at the counter asking for quarters to feed her parking meter.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” said the employee. “Those meters don’t work anyway.”
The interaction took place near the intersection of Raymond and University avenues where, for some cloudy reason, the city still boasts coin-only parking meters, which are functionally useless in today’s cashless society.
The apparent lack of enforcement means the meters stand as mere symbols, resulting in a worst-of-both-worlds policy outcome: The impractical parking meters ward off potential customers while those in the know fearlessly park all day, using up valuable on-street parking.
On top of this, of course, the city of St. Paul receives no income from its public space. That’s a problem because the city budget is in trouble – even more than in most years. The current deficit is around $26 million, more than 5% of its general fund, which means service cuts, tax hikes or both.
To take one example: Mayor Kaohly Her’s recent (and rescinded) proposal to close the Dayton’s Bluff Library would have only saved the city around $300,000, at least for next year, but that’s the fine grain with which St. Paul leaders need to cut costs or scrounge for change at city hall.
I suggest a path forward. Given the dilemma around cuts and taxes, St. Paul should put more value on its public spaces by improving its parking technology and reducing subsidies. Doing so would boost the city’s climate agenda and promote equity by staving off property tax hikes and budget cuts.
I’ve written about this before. Charging for parking at popular regional destinations like the Como Zoo would be an obvious place to start. Call it a “climate impact fee” if you must, but it makes sense for a free, city-owned zoo with polar bears and penguins to charge people to park cars while sea ice disappears.
Many years ago, one city hall staffer told me doing so would “only” raise around $1 million per year, a number that has likely increased. The city’s subsequent 2020 consultant study on the matter was not well done – nobody says in a survey that they want to pay for parking. St. Paul should instead copy municipal institutions like Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, whose parking lots are full of paying customers.
St. Paul’s permit parking policy offers another place to find a million dollars – or nearly. The city currently installs signs for 27 complicated “permit parking zones” near places like Grand Casino Arena and the University of St. Thomas. These signs effectively privatize public streets by making it illegal to park without an exclusive permit sticker.
Don’t get me wrong – I get why homeowners in congested areas want to make public curbs an extension of their driveways. But the city should charge closer-to-market prices for this privilege.
At the very least, it costs the city money to administer and enforce these often byzantine rules – many zones are one- or two-hour parking only, making them virtually impossible to police. Yet St. Paul charges only $25 per year, per car, for this privilege. Understandably, about 2,000 car owners take advantage of the subsidy, privatizing streets in typically wealthier parts of the city.
Meanwhile, other cities have policies that better use public space while boosting their bottom lines. Boulder, Colorado, another college town, not only charges more, it also offers non-residents the opportunity to purchase permits at higher costs (depending on demand). It’s essentially a free revenue stream for the city.
Portland, Oregon charges drivers $230 per year for on-street car storage, almost ten times the St. Paul fee, with a cap on cars per address. (There is also an income-based permit program that cuts that cost in half.) For the record, that’s still a great deal for a year’s supply of car storage. Try to beat that on spothero.com.
Drawing on data from the city’s 2017 study of permit parking, my back of the napkin guess is that changes to fees could generate at least $500,000 in annual revenue for the city’s general fund, and possibly more. Given the severity of the budget crisis, that’s not pocket change.
Of course, drivers accustomed to the privilege of free parking won’t like this. I’d wager that auto-oriented businesses might even hire a PR firm to rile people up, as they did when then-Mayor Coleman planned to install parking meters on Grand Avenue back in 2015.
But money has to come from somewhere. Would you rather have homeowners pay higher rates to privatize the street in front of their house, or that property taxes go up for everyone across the board, no matter their wealth or means of transportation? Would you rather raise accountability for parking scofflaws, or cut funding to a neighborhood library?
These are just the lowest hanging fruits; there are plenty of other ways to reform parking pricing, enforcement and municipal assets that could boost climate action while raising needed funds. In a time without easy answers, this one seems clear to me.
I should take this opportunity to point out a longer-term solution to the city’s struggling tax base that’s floating around City Hall this month. The Planning and Economic Development office is leading an effort to apply mixed-use zoning on historic streetcar corridors like Maryland Avenue, Selby Avenue, Rice Street and West 7th.
This idea is long overdue. Single-use zoning – allowing only one type of activity, say residential or commercial uses, in a given area – was an unfortunate trend of modernist urban planning that swept the nation in the 1920s. Anxieties around race and class embedded themselves in our built environment, led by a real estate industry that saw diversity as a threat to their suburban ideals.
Mixed-use zoning makes sense and reinforces St. Paul’s historic assets. The best parts of the city grew up with mixed-use buildings that today house both businesses (coffee shops!) and apartments. These treasured spots have been illegal to build for decades, at least without jumping through hoops. In my nine years on the Planning Commission, I repeatedly wondered aloud why the city hadn’t re-zoned old streetcar corridors with its “traditional neighborhood” zoning code, an option that has been on the books since 2004.
Well, it’s better late than never. Mixed-use zoning along the city’s historically commercial corridors is a no-brainer and an idea that should reap tax base dividends in a few years. In the meantime, though, charging people a bit more to park their cars will have to do.
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