investigativevoice.com

On the heels of a traumatic shooting at one of the city’s premier tourist spots, Baltimore City officials displayed what can only be called a deft sense of timing last week.

Just as the media was abuzz about an incident at Phillips Express restaurant in the Light Street Pavilion that left tourists scrambling for safety and the city’s image tarnished yet again, city parking officials unveiled a plan to double and possibly triple the price of on-street parking downtown.

Officially The Baltimore City Parking Authority said the increase was to make the cost of parking on the street comparable to the price of parking a vehicle in a parking garage.

Huh?

Since when is it the job of government to bolster the value of service that may be overpriced in the first place? And truthfully shouldn’t it cost a little extra to have your vehicle safely stowed away inside an ostensibly secured building?

This is a prime example of why this city can’t get its collective act together. In the midst of a recession, soon after a highly publicized act of violence at the Inner Harbor, one of a series at the city’s primary lure for tourists, city officials come up with an ingenious plan: raise the price of parking downtown.

That’s why our newest Common Sense award winner is City Councilman Jack Young.

The often outspoken council veteran appeared to employ what the brain trust in the parking authority has in seemingly embarrassingly small doses: common sense.

Noting the aforementioned recession, the only council member on the Parking Authority board did not support the raise, and was willing to back his no vote by speaking out publicly.

Along with his argument that the rate hike was ill timed, Young also took issue with the rationale proffered by Parking Authority head Peter Little; people were parking on the street too long. If that’s the case, Young argued, why not enforce the law and cite the violators instead of raising the rates and punish the innocent, compliant motorists?

Young also pointed out that by all but conceding it can’t enforce the law that restricts on-street parking to one hour, the city was wasting big investments in technology designed to make just such enforcement easy. The city has invested millions of dollars in license plate recognition technology, electronic parking kiosks, and portable digital ticket writers, Young noted, technology that should make it possible to catch violators and achieve the stated goal of keeping long-term parkers off the streets without discouraging tourists from visiting downtown.

Of course, most importantly, Young’s refusal to vote for the increase shows at least one city official understands that the search for new sources of revenue to feed the city’s ineluctable hunger for cash is ultimately unsustainable. The ill-fated formula of higher taxes, high crime, high car insurance, poor schools, and corrupt governance is nothing more than a slow-acting poison that will consign this city to a future as murky as the harbor waters that expurgate a half-dozen corpses a year.

So let’s hope that Councilman Young’s common sense rubs off on his colleagues, and the city reconsiders the plan to raise parking fees.

Congratulations, Councilman Young. Your Investigative Voice T-shirt is on its way.