Rocky: Get rid of meters

Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson wants to rid the city of parking meters and has requested a cost-benefit analysis to determine how the move would affect the city's bottom line.

Alison McFarlane, Anderson's senior adviser for economic development, told the City Council about the mayor's parking meter designs Thursday as she reported on the administration's progress in implementing the council's "Policy Statement on the Future Economic Development of Downtown."

Some City Council members have for years wondered about the effectiveness of parking meters and questioned whether more people might come downtown if street parking was free instead of metered.

"I was pleased to read that the mayor agrees with that goal," Councilman Dave Buhler said.

The council allocated funds this year to test free parking during certain parts of the day, like after 3 p.m., and in the policy statement asked that the pros and cons of parking meters be studied.

The mayor's new designs would eliminate parking meters from the city for good, creating hundreds of new free parking spaces downtown.

The idea is lost parking ticket revenue and meter money could be offset or tempered by getting more shoppers downtown and therefore more sales tax revenue for the city.

McFarlane said a similar experiment in Denver proved to be beneficial and noted the mayor's office could have a proposal to the City Council before year's end.

Parking meters were just a small part of the council's overall discussion Thursday of downtown and how the administration was implementing the council's policy statement, crafted in 2001 and 2002 and passed in 2003.

Data on downtown progress is mixed, but council members generally agree the city is in a much better place that it was two years ago.

"As the first-class pessimist that I am, I am finding some reason to be cautiously optimistic," Councilman Dale Lambert said.

Still, when it comes to downtown the numbers aren't always good.

One "indicator of success" listed by Anderson's administration was that the total office space vacancy rate in the Central Business District at midyear 2004 was 15.7 percent and was expected to shrink by another 1.5 percent by year's end. However, in 2002, when the council was crafting its policy statement, the office vacancy rate was much lower, at 10.9 percent, according to a council report.

Another indicator of success is the amount of office space downtown — 10.12 million square feet as of midyear 2004. But that's up less than 0.01 percent from 2001, when there was 10.04 million square feet, according to a council report.