Question: Does it really make sense to pay sworn, armed police officers making upwards of $100,000 a year in wages and benefits to pound the pavement downtown looking for red flags on parking meters, when the city could pay someone else a fraction of that to do the same thing?
If your answer is no, you've got company in City Hall.
Mayor Dan Sullivan wants cops off that beat, too. But he can't do it himself. Only voters can.
More than a decade ago, people got so incensed over a series of wildly unpopular traffic and parking issues -- remember photo radar? -- that they changed the city charter to make it so that only sworn cops can enforce any city traffic law, including parking violations.
For awhile, that worked OK, if a little inconsistently. New police recruits going to training academies took over parking meter enforcement downtown. But city finances are tight now; there was no police academy this year and none are planned for next year. And it doesn't take long for drivers to notice that the odds of finding a ticket on their windshield when they fail to plug the meter are going down.
Sullivan and several other city officials, including the agency that absorbed the unpopular Anchorage Parking Authority several years ago, want to go back to the old system of hiring regular employees to write parking tickets when drivers overstay their quarters on downtown streets. "We want to put our police officers back to fighting crime and not writing (parking) tickets," Sullivan said in a recent interview.
A proposal to ask voters to do that at the April city election was on the mayor's desk earlier this month. He decided to push it back until 2011. He said he's afraid voters would reject the notion if it's not put to them carefully. They've done so twice already, in 1997 when they first passed the charter amendment handing vehicle code enforcement exclusively to police, and again in 2006.
"The worst thing you can do is rush that, get it on the ballot without a very comprehensive buy-in by all interested parties," Sullivan said.
The mayor wants to spend a year talking the issue up at community councils and other community groups. "Getting the Chamber of Commerce and the Rotaries and every group that has an interest in a viable downtown (behind it), and they can spread the word through their constituencies," he said.
"I'm just absolutely convinced, with the hangover from the parking authority, photo radar, all that stuff where it got so intrusive, that if you don't have that very well wired it won't pass, and then you won't get it on the ballot for another six to eight years."
The idea of switching back to the old system only for the downtown business district came from the Anchorage Community Development Authority, a semi-autonomous city agency created by the Anchorage Assembly in 2005. A nine-member board oversees the authority, which took over the old Parking Authority and operates city-owned downtown lots and garages as well as some real estate developments, including the Northpointe Bluff subdivision on Government Hill.
The development authority's executive director, Ron Pollock, said the agency is better designed and equipped to oversee parking enforcement than in the old days, when a sort of "parking czar" ran the authority with little oversight from City Hall and managed to annoy people all over town.
"Now, the ACVA is not run by an individual," Pollock said. "I answer to a board, and the board is appointed by the mayor. The goal is not just revenues, not just to be punitive, we just need that steady, consistent enforcement."
While anger over downtown parking was part of the fuel behind the 1997 charter amendment, outrage over a city-contracted "photo radar" operation that snapped pictures of speeders and sent tickets to vehicle owners sealed the deal. The radar program got to be so unpopular that the Assembly repealed it a week before voters got a chance to.
Downtown merchants want to see some better enforcement of on-street parking rules, but they don't want to make it so risky or pricey to park in the central business district that customers decide instead to patronize outlying malls, said Christopher Schutte, executive director of the Anchorage Downtown Partnership.
"Downtown parking in any city will always get a bad rap" from some, Schutte said. "When there isn't enforcement, there won't be angry letters to the editor. But for a downtown to function properly, parking has to be managed."
By DON HUNTER
dhunter@adn.com