First, please accept my apology for the lateness of my reply to your very insightful question. As you might imagine, the final weeks of the campaign are extremely busy ones and the demands on my time continue to grow. As a result, I am not always able to respond to questions as quickly as I like but I do try and set aside some time each week to do so. While this is no excuse for my tardiness, I nonetheless hope that you can understand that the increased constraints on my time in no way reflect upon either my willingness or my desire to respond to the individual concerns of the Oaklanders who have sacrificed their own time to pose these questions to me, yourself included. That said, let me answer your question.
The purpose of parking meters and citations for violating the time limits of those meters is the facilitation of business. Simply put, parking meters exist not to generate revenue for the City but rather to ensure that potential customers of our merchants can find places to park their cars so that they can patronize our retail businesses. Somewhere along the way, this was forgotten by our career-politician elected officials who view parking revenues as yet another source of income that they can use to fund their ill-conceived and short-sighted budgetary decisions. This original, and legitimate, purpose of parking fees was reflected in Section 10.56.080 of the Oakland Municipal Code. This section, enacted in 1963, required that all parking revenues be deposited on behalf of the generating district into two funds. One-half of the fees generated were required to be deposited into the “Off-street Parking Meter Fund,” which was to be used for the maintenance and installation of parking meters in that district, and the other half of the generated funds to be deposited into the “Traffic Control Fund” to improve and preserve the flow of traffic through that particular district.
Last year, members of our City Council voted to strike this provision of our municipal code in order to allow the parking funds generated by each district to be deposited into the General Fund. The justification for this vote, which included “yea” votes by two of my competitors, was that the revenues hadn’t been properly deposited for a number of years. As an aside, I’d like to say that I do not believe that the fact that the flaunting of an existing law is itself a justification for repealing a legal requirement. Rather, I think it is evidence of an exigency which demands compliance with a legal mandate. Regardless, my opponents decided that it was a justification for converting district parking fees into another source of income to cover their budgetary mismanagement and they quickly seized upon this opportunity.
I do not believe that parking fees should be relied upon as a revenue source for the City. That was never the intended purpose for their institution and I believe that such a reliance encourages aggressive, unyielding parking enforcement that damages, rather than promoting business as was originally envisioned when such fees were instituted. Under my administration, parking enforcement will be focused on the management of traffic in order to facilitate business, not on the generation of income for the City.
That said, in answer to your question, I believe that 100% of the parking revenues generated within a district should be applied to that district. This refers to those revenues generated by parking meters. For those monies received as a result of parking citations, I believe that, once the cost of enforcement personnel has been deducted, the remainder of these funds should also be used for the benefit of the district wherein they were generated. As to the use of those funds, I believe the appropriate starting point would be the command of the stricken municipal code section I referred to above. I believe that meter maintenance as well as street maintenance of those areas should be the priority for the usage of these funds. If excess funding remains after these expenditures, then perhaps I would consider alternative uses, such as applying then in other districts for the same purposes. The key point is that parking revenues, like the fees themselves, should be used to facilitate the movement of traffic in order to benefit our businesses. They should never be merged with other funds in order to maintain a private money pot that our City Council can use to cover the failings of their compromised, political decisions. The corruption of parking fees, which converted them from a traffic facilitation device and into just another revenue source, is a large reason that Oakland is viewed as unfriendly to business and certainly has contributed to the economic crisis we face. Under my administration, this corruption will end and traffic control will be undertaken with its justifiable goal, to encourage business, at the forefront of parking enforcement.
I hope that this has satisfactorily answered your question. I do appreciate you taking the time to ask it and again apologize for the lateness of my answer. I hope you will support my candidacy by casting your ballot for Joe Tuman for Mayor on November 2 and encouraging your friends and family to do likewise.
Sincerely,
Joe Tuman
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