Rantz: Enough! Pay for juror parking

I’m one of the few people who thinks jury duty would be kind of fun because it plays into my ego and God complex, which is probably why I never get called in for duty.

And I get that most of you don’t want to deal with that because it can be a total hassle, which is why I’m watching a story unfold in Pierce County where there are two simple things they need to figure out to make jury duty less painful for people.

The Tacoma News Tribune reports that Superior Court Presiding Judge Frank Cuthbertson says he constantly gets complaints from jurors on two issues: lack of free parking and the toll to pass the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

The free parking issue is the big complaint though. And it appears the county doesn’t have a clue how to handle this.

So, for starters, the county building in downtown Tacoma doesn’t have nearly enough free parking spots for jurors on their busiest of days.

They have 174 free parking spaces in and around the building, but the average amount of jurors on Monday exceed 200 and on Tuesday and Wednesday there are 180. Remember: that’s the average, meaning sometimes, it’s a lot more and the Tribune says it can exceed 250.

And the only other options for these folks who are maybe coming in from Gig Harbor, is to pay to park in one of the lots around the area for between $5 to $15 a day, which is a lot when you’re getting paid $10 to be on a jury.

You can do street parking, but it’s metered and you can’t just leave it there all day.

So what to do? The bus isn’t an option for a lot of folks and carpooling is hard. I feel like we should just reimburse for parking. I don’t know why this is such a difficult thing to do. Have the juror submit receipts for parking, budget for this expense, and you’ve made it a little easier on folks because one thing we don’t want is some juror coming in, angry at the world because she couldn’t find free parking, and deciding the fate of some poor sap on trial.

The county, according to the Tribune, says it would cost about $25,000 a year to cover parking for jurors. That’s not an unreasonable sum. Apparently the county council offered up $17,000 to cover this already.

Outside of the argument that the money has to come from somewhere, what am I missing here?

Shouldn’t we make being a juror as easy as humanely possible? Shouldn’t you, as a matter of principle, be against charging people to be a juror? This is an important civic duty, it’s incredibly meaningful and a great way to engage the public. Start thinking about the customer (the juror) and make the experience as worthwhile as possible so maybe we have less sighs and eye rolling when folks get their jury summons.