Council Considers Meter Fee Increase

Housing Programs Stand to Benefit

The D.C. Council is considering emergency legislation to double the price of downtown meter parking and to scrap the city's longtime practice of allowing people to park free at meters in the central business district on the weekend.

D.C. Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), who chairs the council's Committee on Public Works and the Environment, said increasing the parking rate from $1 to $2 an hour could help finance several city programs that have faced budget cuts or been put on hold.

"This is not about finding additional revenue, this is about finding more money for a specific compelling need in the city," Graham said. "If we pass this bill next Tuesday, we believe that the Department of Transportation could implement the bill by March 1 and that will allow us about seven months where we can raise about $8 million to $10 million."

Other meter fees would increase by 50 percent, Graham's office said.

Committee members also heard from affordable-housing advocates who testified in support of the bill, which would generate revenue to finance funds for first-time home buyers, the poor and the city's program set up to provide permanent supportive housing to the homeless.

Robert Pohlman, a former chief financial officer for the District and executive director of the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development, spoke in support of the increase Monday.

"The downtown parking meter increase appears to be something that the downtown business community actually supports," Pohlman said.

"Rather than commuters parking in those spaces, shoppers are more likely to use those spaces that pay the higher rate and that will discourage commuters from feeding the meters all day and free up those spaces for shoppers."

Pohlman added, "We are hoping that the money will be used to restore some of the affordable housing budget cuts."

Graham said that members of the city's Business Improvement District are indeed in support of the plan because the higher rates would encourage people to not keep spaces all day. Compared with New York, Philadelphia and other large cities, Graham said, the District's parking meters are a bargain. "You can do one of two things. You can either cut programs or increase revenue, and what motivates me to do it is that we have several key housing programs that serve poor people that are on the chopping block."

The D.C. Council's move comes on the eve of a report by the DC AppleSeed Center titled "Building the Best Capital City in the World." It says that even though District officials have balanced the budget 11 years in a row and worked hard to be fiscally responsible, the District will never be financially solvent because of a structural imbalance that has existed since its inception.