I’ve decided to revisit the downtown Pontiac parking meter issue while waiting for Mr. Konopaskie to approve the edits I did on his response to some of our issues in our post, “What’s Up Pontiac? A Conversation.”

A couple of us DMMers were driving down Saginaw Street in Pontiac when, for the first time, we saw a parking meter attendant issuing tickets and taking photos of the backs of vehicles or at least typing down license plate numbers of parking meter violations. As most of you know, we at DMM think that parking meters that require payment after 5:00 PM in the downtown area of a city that is striving to make a comeback is a terrible idea. Unfortunately, the Pontiac Downtown Business Association (PDBA) has set a requirement for payment until 11:00 PM at night…in Pontiac…we must be the new New York!

The most cited reason for the parking meters in the first place was to stop downtown employees from utilizing all the parking during business hours and keeping potential patrons from having a place to park. OK, we’re good with that. However, those people aren’t for the most part parking there after 5 or 5:30 PM. So why the payments until 11:00 PM? Have you ever been in downtown Pontiac after 11? It is utterly dead unless something is going on at the Crofoot Ballroom. Another excuse for the meters is that Royal Oak and Birmingham have parking meters. Yes, yes they do. They also have parking garages with two free hours of parking, not to mention that they are not trying to recover from having almost no businesses downtown that would attract people from the surrounding areas.

As far as we at DMM are concerned, all this metering does is discourage people from coming to downtown and will shortly hurt business rather than helping it. Frankly, we haven’t been to Downtown 51 Grill since it was implemented, down from once or twice a week.

So I decided to check with the new attendant about the percentage of tickets he was writing, since it was about 7:15, there was a concert at Crofoot, and a lot of the parking spots were filled. He was, by the way, a really nice and decent guy.

Long story short, as I was approaching him he was ticketing a lady who’s meter had expired three minutes earlier and she was also approaching him. She had just eaten at Downtown 51 Grill, which is yummy, btw. This new parking system was supposed to have sent her a text message warning her that her time was running out and, naturally, it did not. Being a great guy, he let her put MORE MONEY into the meter and then didn’t ticket her. Bear in mind it was approaching 7:30 PM at night in Pontiac!

I wish I had taken pictures, but I was in constant conversation with those around me and I forgot. I admit I was somewhat annoyed about the entire thing, but here is the situation for parking in Pontiac. The parking spots are NOT individually marked in any way that indicates you have to feed a meter. The meters are the type that are centrally located on the block and you have to go there and enter your license plate number along with the payment. Think about that. You have to not only remember, but type in your plate number. Here is the other thing. If you aren’t paying VERY close attention you will never know that parking payment is required. The signs that inform you of that are at least 10 feet off the ground and widely spaced (and ugly, but that’s another story). So, unless you pull into your space in a semi-trailer, you probably won’t even notice the signs and be parking illegally.

Back to the parking attendant…He showed me the list of cars that had paid for parking. It was a very short list, probably about 5% of the cars that had parked. Bear in mind that Pontiac hasn’t had paid parking for years, combine that with the silly Jack-in-the-beanstalk signs, and almost everyone at Crofoot who parked in the street tonight will get a ticket. Yes, that’s a great way to get people to come to downtown Pontiac, amIright?

I haven’t agreed with the former Emergency Manager, Mr. Lou Schimmel, about a lot, but I definitely agree with him that Pontiac did NOT need parking meters yet, and never needs any to be run past 6:00 PM in the evening. If the daytime parking by downtown employees is such a big problem, forget the meters and set a two hour time limit on parking during the daytime, then ticket them. This isn’t rocket science and not everything requires an overly complicated bureaucratic solution that will aggravate visitors to our city rather than welcoming them.