San Diego parking overhaul reaches community parking districts too

The sweeping overhaul of the city of San Diego’s parking rules this year targeted nearly every aspect of leaving your car on a metered street — hourly rates doubled, paid parking on Sundays, extended hours in some areas, surge pricing in others, credit card transactions fees, paying to park in Balboa Park and possibly Mission Bay Park.

Lost among the controversial changes was the city’s new policy when it comes to dealing with the seven current community parking districts, spread from downtown to Pacific Beach and mid-city.

The City Council quietly enacted the changes in June, upsetting several of the parking districts’ governing boards. They say the changes hamstring their ability to use their share of revenues generated from parking meters in the designated districts, and place a cap on administrative expenses.

But city officials say the new rules more accurately comply with state laws governing how the money can be spent, and put a check on inappropriate uses of the funds. 

The revision to the city policy coincided with other critiques of the districts this year, from a city board and the county grand jury. 

In March the Mobility Board sent a letter to Councilmember Stephen Whitburn, who is the chairman of the Active Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, citing the same transparency issues as the grand jury.

The letter also said that some of the districts’ governing boards have potential conflicts of interest because some individuals are also members of larger business improvement districts that the parking districts are nested in. 

The board’s letter noted that “there is a surprising lack of oversight of the proceedings of these boards to ensure members are recusing, abstaining, and stating the nature of their conflicts of interest to ensure the public’s trust is maintained in the decisions they are making for the use of public resources.”

And in April, the county grand jury recommended the city abolish the districts entirely. The report said the districts “create unnecessary layers of bureaucracy,” spend too much on administration, and lack accountability and transparency.

The city has yet to respond to the grand jury report. In the meantime, the districts are in a kind of limbo. They operate via a yearly contract that spells out how they intend to spend their share of revenues and which has to be approved by the council.

But currently no districts have an agreement with the city as the districts and city hall tussle over what projects are allowed. 

“Despite continued back and forth and extensive guidance around eligible projects from department staff and the City Attorney’s Office, the City has not received work plans identifying eligible projects with sufficient detail from all CPDs in order to bring them forward for Council approval,” spokesperson Leslie Wolf Branscomb said in an email response to inewsource.

The parking districts were established by a City Council policy first adopted in 1997, and are intended to provide a way for neighborhoods to develop projects that address parking, traffic safety and mobility in a designated area.

The projects are funded from the districts’ percentage cut of the revenues from the meters, after the city takes its administrative costs off the gross revenue first.

The remainder was split with the city getting 55%, and the districts 45%. 

The new policy changed the allocations, with the city getting 85% and the districts 15%. Branscomb, however, said in an email the districts will end up with “roughly the same allocations in past years” because the parking meter rates doubled from $1.25 an hour to $2.50.

While the revenues may be about the same amount, the city has tightened oversight on how the funds can be spent. This has irked several districts which say projects they wanted to do have been rejected, and the new rules are too onerous.

Michael Trimble, the executive director of the Gaslamp Quarter Association, said the changes were sudden and impacted a project that was funded in part via revenues from the parking district. 

“Hundreds of thousands of dollars of projects, like a mobility marketing campaign, pole-to-pole lighting in the Gaslamp Quarter, things of that nature are no longer eligible,” he said.

Parking meter revenue from the downtown parking district group was used to partially fund the deployment of steel bollards on Fifth Avenue, which turned several blocks into a pedestrian-only promenade. But in February the bollards were removed and the promenade eliminated after Trimble said the city cut funding.

Soon after, parking meters were installed on Fifth Avenue, he said.

But a spokesperson for the mayor responded that Trimble’s group was responsible. Rachel Laing said the council had approved expending $100,000 in parking revenues for the bollard program, but the contract that the Gaslamp Quarter Association struck for placement and removal of the bollards cost $400,000 annually. 

She said the city made it clear funds would pay for only the first year of the program, and that neither city nor parking district funds would be available to cover the cost in subsequent years. The group was told it could find other funding or negotiate the contract. 

“To our awareness, no effort was made by GQA to secure alternative funding or to amend the contract; instead, GQA invoiced the City for costs that exceeded the Council appropriated funds,” she wrote in an email.

Another flashpoint involves trash bins in Bankers Hill. The Uptown Community Parking District had been using parking revenues to pay a contractor to empty about 50 trash bins on Fourth and Fifth avenues.

But the program was halted on July 1, when the city paused approving new agreements with the parking district, said Ben Nicholls, director of the Hillcrest Business Association. Unable to pay the contractor, volunteers have been emptying the cans.

He said the city contends using parking district revenues for maintenance projects like emptying the trash is not allowed. The Hillcrest Business Association has appealed, arguing there is no prohibition against using the revenue to maintain existing projects, Nicholls said.

In May the parking district in Pacific Beach wrote a letter to Mayor Todd Gloria expressing the board’s opposition to the changes being proposed under the new council policy, such as limitations and more oversight on what projects can be undertaken.

 The district board said a new 15% cap on administrative costs for projects was “unworkable” because it did not account for legal, staff and other costs. 

But in the statement the city said the cap is needed to make sure funds are used correctly. “These funds are intended to deliver public benefits, not support administrative costs and operations for entities that manage a CPD,” the statement said. 

In fact a review of reimbursement request for the fiscal year that ended on June 30 showed “many CPD entities requested well over 15% of their total funding allocation for administrative or personnel costs, and it’s not always clear how these expenses support the delivery of specific, eligible projects,” Branscomb said in the email response. 

Similar concerns over how the districts were operating were also raised in the letter the Mobility Board sent to Whitburn. It said that some boards have members who are also members of a Business Improvement District board, leading to potential conflicts of interest. Without giving a specific example it said that parking district board members who are also BID board members have voted to use parking revenues that benefit the BID.

That means “BIDs are both allocating parking revenue to BID projects that are hardly defensible as parking projects and are charging an administrative fee to implement CPD projects that benefit the BID’s bottom line,” the letter noted.

It called on the City Council and the Independent Budget Analyst to review conflict of interest rules for the boards and enhance training, reporting and oversight “to protect the public’s trust in how decisions are being made on the use of public resources.”

Daniel Reeves, the head of the Mobility Board’s parking district subcommittee who co-wrote the letter, declined to comment.

In calling for disbanding the parking districts entirely the county grand jury recommended that community planning groups take over the role the district boards performed, and manage the revenues raised from parking meters.