This month marks one year since the city of San Diego hiked up prices for special event parking within half a mile of Petco Park during games and special events.<\/p>\n
Now city data shows they\u2019re also racking up thousands of dollars in tickets given out in recent months.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo get people downtown is a struggle as it is and if they\u2019re going to get fined, they\u2019re not going to want to come,\u201d Heather Kline said.<\/p>\n
Kline owns and operates several businesses in downtown San Diego, near Petco Park.<\/p>\n
She is well acquainted with special event parking in the area.<\/p>\n
Special Event Parking rules took effect last year, increasing meter rates to $10 within parking meters half a mile of Petco Park during games and special events for a total of six hours.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve had lots of issues with it,\u201d Kline said.<\/p>\n
City data shows from April to July, the number of special event parking fines jumped from 366 to 1,380.<\/p>\n
In total, the city handed out $223,897.50 in special event tickets, according to city data. This is the total amount cited, not collected.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do have friends who have had to do it and didn\u2019t even realize that it was special event parking, especially because the signs and the parking is so confusing, the apps don\u2019t work, you can\u2019t even pay for it, to me it\u2019s a mess. The whole program is a mess and it wasn\u2019t thought through,\u201d Heather Kline said.<\/p>\n
Special Event Parking was implemented a year ago as part of the city\u2019s effort to help close the budget deficit gap.<\/p>\n
Business owners like Todd Brown and San Diegans said they haven\u2019t benefited from any of it.<\/p>\n
Instead, they said it had the opposite effect.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t get the local business we used to get and we feel the impact, so when you throw in another measure like costly parking. It certainly does not help the situation,\u201d Todd Brown owner of Bub\u2019s said. \u00a0<\/p>\n
The Padres back in January said in a statement, \u201cAt a time when the cost of living in San Diego is already high, the city\u2019s special event parking policy places additional strain on fans, workers, and residents. We supportive or more fan-friendly and community-focused approaches of continued dialogue on this issue, as the current policy was established without input from impacted stakeholders, including the Padres.<\/p>\n
Nine padres\u2019 games are on the city\u2019s list of special event parking for this month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This month marks one year since the city of San Diego hiked up prices for special event parking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":452072,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[5196,74,76,75],"class_list":["post-452071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-downtown-san-diego","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=452071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/452072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}