After Go, it's everybody's favourite spot to land on the Monopoly board.
Free Parking.
The board game mirrors the rest of our existence quite well - we go around in circles, most of the spots we land on require us to pay somebody else to be there and the only way to really get ahead is to be one of the people who owns stuff and get paid by other people to use it.
The missing ingredient in Monopoly has always been government, although the banker does collect taxes on a few spots during the game.
In real life, however, government is everywhere, on every spot of the board, even Free Parking, providing services but also charging for those services through taxes and other fees.
That's what makes the crisis of conscience many city councillors are having about the increases to off-street parking rates so puzzling. They are in the business of directing city staff on which services to provide to residents and for how much. That's half the job. The other, more unpopular half is to decide how much residents should pay.
Moderate annual increases to offer the same level of service are expected and most citizens grudgingly accept them. The outcry over the hefty increases in monthly parking, ranging from 12 to 85 per cent, should have been anticipated by the legislators approving these increases, along with the senior administrators bringing them to the council table.
The fact that it wasn't speaks volumes about how tone-deaf the bureaucrats and the elected officials can be at times.
"I think it's a sad state of affairs when we can't recognize the amount of increase we've put on people in our parking facilities and be able to deal with it," said Coun. Frank Everitt. "I understand that we don't want to be flipping back and forth but I think we have a legitimate problem in front of us and we as a council need to be able to find a way to review that for people."
The actual sad state of affairs was the inability of Everitt and his colleagues to recognize how their actions might affect the people paying the bill. It's also sad that Everitt expects a second kick at the can on this issue. As a union man, Everitt should know that neither management nor the employees get to crack open a contract that's been ratified. It's called "you made your bed, you sleep in it."
Many of the councillors want to "fix" this problem but not one has acknowledged that the parking rate increases are a problem they created. They obviously accepted the reasons given at the time to raise the parking fees so dramatically or they wouldn't have approved them. Instead of taking responsibility for their "mistake," however, the councillors are criticizing the system, which doesn't allow them to flip-flop, belly-flop, give the dog a bone, every time they make an unpopular decision.
Under the city's council procedures bylaw, a councillor who supported a successful motion can only ask for reconsideration of that motion at the next council meeting, while the mayor, under the Community Charter, has 30 days to bring a vote back for reconsideration.
This procedures bylaw isn't in place to hamper city councillors from doing their duty, it's there to help. It keeps mayor and council moving forward and takes away the temptation to go back and reconsider every past decision at every future meeting. If that was allowed, potentially no work would ever get done and every meeting could be hijacked by past business. It protects everyone from "whichever way the wind is blowing today" governing and also holds mayor and council accountable for their decisions and whatever impacts, intended or not, that flow from them. Mayor and council don't get to order fish and then ask where their steak is when the salmon arrives, nor should they.
"This group has to be able to somehow, not necessarily to reverse that, to fine tune it or correct it," said Coun. Albert Koehler.
Sorry.
There are no do-overs, whether it's rolling the dice in Monopoly or passing legislation.
And now the councillors have to pay the price in the form of irate residents raging at them over the rate increases.
Accountability. It's great until it's you being held to it.
There is no Free Parking, except on the Monopoly board.
