Don't Use Parking to Fix Budget

That complaint is endemic to UNC, where thousands of off-campus students vie for a dwindling number of parking spaces after 5 p.m. and on weekends.

Whether it's for a trip to the library or a campus meeting, cars begin circling around the Bell Tower Lot as early as 4:45 p.m. looking for a space.

And while finding parking in downtown Chapel Hill has never been easy, it might soon get more expensive.

At a budget work session last week, town officials considered ways to offset a $1.4 million budget shortfall. With that gaping hole and a new budget needed by June 30, the Chapel Hill Town Council has been searching for ways to cut costs, trim services and raise prices. One attractive option: raise public parking rates.

If the proposal presented to the Town Council last week is passed, you'll shell out $1.25 when you slide into a metered space rather than just $1. Rent a parking space and you'll pay $75 a month rather than $65. Parking in a town garage like the one on Rosemary Street will be 10 cents to 30 cents more per hour, depending how long your car is there.

The hikes would be easy to implement and quite lucrative. The 25 cent hike in metered parking would net an extra $47,000 a year alone. The monthly rental increase would bring in $23,000 and the public garage jump would draw an extra $173,000. Total largess to the town: approximately $257,000.

Not a bad haul, but unless town officials want to be seen as robber barons, they should seek ways to increase the amount of parking in the town -- not just the amount to park.

Unfortunately, that doesn't appear to be the case.

Instead of eyeing the thousands of dollars parking rate increases will yield for projects like new parking lots, some town officials see the money as a way to line the town's General Fund.

$100,000 has been yanked from the Parking Fund and put in the General Fund to help alleviate the budget woes.

If parking rates were raised, it would be the first such measure since 1993. And town hourly parking rates would exceed hourly parking rates on campus.

There will be a forum May 8 for public input before the budget is finalized at May's end.

Sure, you can try and slip past the prowling guards and park at University Square or park behind McDonald's and hope no one notices that it doesn't take four hours to finish off a Big Mac.

But the more inconvenienced customers are, the less likely they are to venture downtown to play the parking game.

In response to concerns from downtown merchants, the council has decided to consider subsidized parking downtown. Nice start, but not enough. More parking spaces need to be built.

Council member Pat Evans has it right. "I don't think we should make it more expensive for people to come downtown. We should make it less expensive," she said last week.

It's not easy to balance the desire for an aesthetically pleasing downtown with the need for parking lots and multilevel parking decks.

But until the supply of spaces goes up or the demand for them goes down, the Town Council should not jack up the price to get to Chapel Hill's most vibrant area just to pad the coffers.

Columnist Jonathan Chaney can be reached at jhchaney@email.unc.edu.