City employees breaking rules after they took away parking

Taken from Tuesday’s edition of The David Boze Show on 770 KTTH.

In the City of Seattle, there’s been several efforts that have diminished the number of parking spots.

There are parklets, which turn a parking spot into a little park for people to sit in or for homeless people to do drugs in. There are bike lanes, which take up space that used to be for cars. There are all kinds of reasons that cars are kept out of certain places, but there are supposed to be at least some little havens, little coves for cars to rest, called parking spaces.

But according to a report from KING 5, it turns out that city government employees are abusing the time limits on some of these rarely available parking spaces. In the report, commercial vehicles were shown trying to access load/unload zones and they weren’t able to because those spaces have been sucked up by city employees.

Scott Thompson, with Seattle City Light, told KING 5:

“No we are not playing by different rules and we expect all of our employees to follow those same rules just as everyone else does.”

He’s a little off there because they have been playing by different rules. Judging from what KING 5 was finding, it looks like regular abuse of the time limits. City employees are allowed to park for free, but expected to observe time limits.

I totally get the temptation to break the rules. These city employees work downtown all the time and they don’t want to be bothered. It is tough to find a space. It is a big hassle.

But I’d like to say: welcome to your own creation. It’s difficult to park in Seattle and it is annoying.

A delivery man named Egor told KING 5, “Parking is tough for us for commercial vehicles.”

At first he said he was mad about seeing city vehicles in zones he pays for a permit to access. But realizing they were city vehicles, said, “What are you going to do about it? There’s nothing you can do.”

He has been abused long enough now where he’s saying, I know I can’t do anything about it, it’s the city, it’s the government.

Egor has an accent and I want to ask Egor where he’s from, what country of origin he is from, and what was the government like there.

It sends such a horrible message if your government ends up operating under different rules. We don’t need that. That’s what strong-arm governments do.

Not following the rules has consequences. If you don’t follow the rules, you don’t allow people to park quickly and get their stuff taken care of, and the whole thing backs up.

Sean Whitcomb, spokesperson for the Seattle Police Department, showed KING 5 that 15 tickets have been written for city vehicles this year. But with as many violations as KING 5 found, that indicates to me that 15 is far too few. There is way too much of this going on.

But since the City of Seattle already has several efforts that diminish parking capacity for drivers, do we really think anyone will care about this latest thing keeping us from parking?

Taken from Tuesday’s edition of The David Boze Show on 770 KTTH.

JS