The Parking Windfall

July 29, 2016

I don’t shop in downtown Traverse City anymore. It’s not a personal conviction or political statement. It happened little by little. When I run errands, the last place I think to go is downtown, and there is only one reason: parking. Downtown parking makes shopping too time consuming and expensive.

Strangely enough, I spend a lot of time downtown. At least a few times a week I take my dog for a walk through downtown, but that’s not shopping. We park, free, on the street in a neighborhood and stroll through downtown and to the bay and back in the course of our twoto three-mile route. When my activity includes walking, it’s no trouble at all to park far away and walk to my destination. While I’m on these walks, I pass several stores that sell products I will end up buying later, somewhere else. I don’t want to schlep purchases a half-mile back to my car. I’ve literally stopped at Meijer, after a walk downtown, to run in and buy a few things before I head home.

If I have an hour to kill, I often park at the boat launch by the marina to look for an interesting photograph or just enjoy the view of the bay. I take clients there for photographs. I’m at that waterfront often. Other than dropping $1 in the meter, I don’t spend a penny. It would be easy to laugh at my strange behavior or call me lazy. But I’m not. There are many people just like me, and Traverse City’s Downtown Development Authority, which controls our parking money, has shaped our actions.

Parking should be a service businesses offer customers in order to facilitate easy access to spending. Stores and malls maintain their free parking lots for the convenience of their customers. Not in downtown Traverse City, where parking is a business. Traverse City’s DDA has lost sight of its original reason for existence: to bring customers downtown. Instead it has become a force unto itself. Its staff is influenced by political ideas that see cars — the things that bring people to downtown — as a problem. Parking, the DDA claims, should have a price to encourage people to use mass transportation. That logic only works if there isn’t easy, convenient, free parking somewhere else. Under the auspice of creating a community virtue, the DDA slowly made parking more and more expensive and less and less available.

The authorization path is a web to be unfolded. Traverse City Parking Services runs the parking lots and collect from the meters. All the money goes into its budget. But TC Parking is not an independent organization. It is a department of the Downtown Development Authority, which is already funded by property taxes captured throughout downtown. The City of Traverse City contracts parking services to the DDA, and the city receives 10 percent of the parking revenue back for its general fund. The other 90 percent of the money collected for parking goes to fund the parking empire itself. We’re paying so much to park so that the DDA’s Parking Services can grow, make parking more complicated, and collect more money. It‘s not clear how this helps the downtown.

On its website, Traverse City Parking Services claims the two parking decks offer “the most affordable parking rates in town!” Pretty funny, since it controls all the parking in town and sets the rates. It can cost up to $10 a day to park in the “affordable” parking deck. Why would anyone take 30 minutes to park in the “affordable” Hardy Parking Deck and walk a block to the new 4Front Credit Union, when three blocks west on Front Street, Huntington Bank has free parking in a lot by its front door? Overpriced parking might work in big cities where the nearest alternatives are 10 or more miles away. But in Traverse City, alternatives are minutes away. The DDA doesn’t care; it has a great little business going.

No one needs to go downtown anymore. DDA leadership has turned downtown into a place primarily for entertainment. We have great restaurants, some excellent brewpubs, and unique specialty shops that can bring in tourists. All the political support for local commerce and small business will not overcome the obstacles of inconvenience and expense. No new downtown business has generated the sort of excitement as the announcement of Costco opening near the airport. Costco will bring in people from other counties on a regular basis, people who otherwise might only come downtown once or twice a year for a night out. Costco will have lots of free parking.

The DDA’s parking decisions do not bring business to downtown. Its actions are often directly contrary to the businesses that created it. The DDA pushed hard to raise its already affordable! parking rates during peak visitor times. It has identified the few customers who don’t have an alternative. Starting with this Cherry Festival, parking will go to a flat, inflated fee whenever the DDA thinks it can get away with a rate hike. But it is taking that windfall from downtown merchants. When the DDA charges $15 for a $4 parking spot, it is making it less likely that those tourists will have an extra $5 for an ice cream cone. The DDA doesn’t care; it took its cut before the visitors even got out of their cars.

The DDA no longer supports the local merchants that need sustaining local customers to shop downtown all year long. The DDA’s misguided political hostility toward automobiles and its shortsighted need to squeeze every dollar out of visitors through the Traverse City Parking Service are working against the people who keep downtown thriving.

Thomas Kachadurian is a photographer, designer and author. He lives on Old Mission with his wife and two children. He is a member and past president of the Traverse Area District Library Board of Trustees.