Too-efficient parking enforcement no way to lure people downtown

As a general rule, I try to avoid being self-serving in my column. I try not to use my public platform to write about issues that I’ve got a personal stake in.
But - and there’s always a but, isn’t there? - I do have one personal issue that drives me absolutely mad, to the point that on rare occasions I ignore all that stuff about separating the personal and the public and have a little rant anyway. The subject is parking tickets.
I’ve had a few in my day - probably 10 a year since I moved here in 1989. I generally pay up within the two-week discount period, primarily because I refuse to let the city take any more money from me.
Every one of the tickets has angered me. That’s neither here nor there as a public issue except if you consider that the City of Victoria has given me at least 200 easy opportunities to feel resentful toward it. I suspect the same goes for virtually anyone who gets a ticket, unless there really are people out there who chuckle good-naturedly at their knuckleheadedness at the sight of another ticket on their windshield.
I’ve had three tickets in the last week and a half. Anyone who spends even small amounts of time in the downtown on a regular basis can relate to the sinking feeling of dashing back to your car only to find a ticket fluttering under your wiper and a $20 instant fine waiting.
The first ticket was issued one minute after a 20-minute meter expired (the city has a grace period of five minutes, but wouldn’t you know, only on 90-minute meters). The other was issued five minutes after I’d distractedly walked away from an unfed meter and briefly poked my head inside a store with a good sale on.
The third was more garden-variety: a meeting simply went on longer than predicted. Running two blocks to feed the meter - which the city doesn’t allow anyway, of course - simply wasn’t an option.
I get the whole revenue/expenses thing. One of the city’s objectives is to offset costs through parking revenues, which generate more than $4 million a year for the city. I also get that if there weren’t rules and fines, people who work downtown might take up all the street space and shoppers wouldn’t be able to find parking.
But equally important objectives in the city’s 2007 parking strategy are to “support the economic vitality of downtown,” and “create incentives to position downtown as the destination of choice.” How does an overly efficient parking-ticket process fit in?
I expect the city will follow up this column with a letter directing me to one of the city’s five parkades, all of which have rates that match that of street meters with the bonus of a discount first hour. They might also recommend I get a parking card, which ensures I always have money for a meter.
I have, in fact, been motivated by rising fine prices to work much harder at using the parkades, and I love my parking card. But there are days when I think I’m going to take 90 minutes, but I take longer. There are days when I’m running late, lugging heavy things, or just unable to turn away from some beautiful open parking spot right out front. Why do I have to be fined $20 for that?
With no disrespect to hard-working city councillors, I’d take away their free parking privileges if it were up to me. Elected officials need to stay real if they want to keep their citizens happy, and that includes experiencing the frustration of parking tickets. Councillors, you need to become familiar with the feeling of being fined for spending too much time in the downtown.
If the problem really is downtown workers hogging meters, then let’s deal with that rather than continue to fine a completely different group of downtown users.
How about opening up the meters to accommodate longer parking? A bigger discount at the parkades, and a reasonable first-day fine rate? Not so long ago, people paid $7.50 if they dealt with their parking tickets promptly; how about a rate like that for those who pay up within a day or two?
Thank you, Downtown Victoria Business Association, for your two-hour-free Saturday coupons and your “meter fairies,” who use top-ups to quietly save people from tickets. I appreciate your attempts to mitigate the effects of an overly efficient parking system.
But it takes more than fairies to fix the inherent problems of a city constantly fining the very people that it’s ostensibly trying to lure into doing business downtown. There has to be a better way.

Old West-style justice system strands binner in Oak Bay

Hear the one about the homeless guy stranded in Oak Bay?
It’d make a pretty good opening line for a joke. But there’s nothing funny about it in reality, seeing as the man who it happened to had no access to food or shelter for 10 days because of a court order banishing him from the City of Victoria.
The courts routinely use “red zone” orders for drug charges to keep people away from certain areas where drugs are bought and sold. The red zone in our region is typically downtown Victoria - roughly the area bounded by Cook, Store, Belleville and Discovery streets.
But binner Ron Beland got hit with the red-zone order of all time last month. Charged with assault after a fight with another homeless man, Beland found himself ordered out of the entire City of Victoria until his next court appearance 10 days later.
Seeing as the region’s only services and supports for homeless people are in the City of Victoria, that left Beland to dig through dumpsters for food and sleep in an Oak Bay park for the duration. Lucky thing it all happened during a stretch of good weather; had it happened during winter, it might have been “a death sentence,” notes Beland.
“Everything I need - everything - is in the downtown,” said Beland. “I showed the Oak Bay cops my order, and they were like, ‘What??!’ They can’t even take me to the drunk tank, because Oak Bay doesn’t have one and I’m not allowed in Victoria.”
Crown counsel spokesman Robin Baird was unaware of Beland’s case and surprised to hear of the extent of the order, although he recalled another time when a judge ordered a Nanaimo man to stay south of the 49th parallel.
“It kind of smacks of the old westerns - taking someone to the outskirts of town,” admitted Baird. “I think that’s too broad a brush for the court to be using. [The justice system] bears the onus at every stage to show that the restrictions on a person’s liberty are not being unduly infringed upon.”
Oak Bay Mayor Chris Causton hadn’t heard about Beland’s banishment either. He was concerned both for Beland’s well-being and the risk to Oak Bay citizens, seeing as Beland was charged with assault.
“I’ve never heard of anything like this,” said Causton. “I don’t know what the backup is at times like this, but we don’t have any services.”
John Howard Society executive director Dave Johnson said he’s been noticing “red-zone creep” in the court orders of his organization’s clients, both in the reach of the zones and the types of offences the orders are used for. It’s not uncommon to see red-zone orders nowadays that extend all the way to the John Howard neighbourhood of Rock Bay, said Johnson - meaning a client risks breaching a court order just by coming in for support.
“But I’ve never heard of anything like this,” says Johnson of Beland’s order. “The downtown red zone at least had boundaries that kind of made sense. Being compelled to reside in Oak Bay - well, that’s interesting. It wouldn’t surprise me if police helped him relocate to Saanich.”
Defence lawyer Tom Merino deals with people like Beland all the time through his legal-aid work. He didn’t know the Beland case personally but said he’s not surprised by it, given the court’s ever-more desperate attempts to manage problems beyond its realm of expertise.
“I find these kinds of orders offensive in the extreme,” said Merino. “I understand the frustration of those in power, trying to use the limited tools available to them. But this doesn’t work. You can’t solve social problems through the courts.”
People can return to court to argue that an order is too onerous, said Merino. But they certainly can’t count on having a lawyer represent them, what with ongoing cuts to legal aid.
Had Beland breached his City of Victoria ban by sneaking downtown for a meal, for instance, he wouldn’t have qualified for legal aid. “Category one” offences such as breaches were delisted as a legal-aid category in B.C. two months ago.
Last we talked, Beland was surviving his 10-day banishment with a little help from his friends - two Victoria binners whose daily bottle routes take them to the Oak Bay border. They shared food, sherry and companionship with Beland, who wasn’t used to the quiet Oak Bay scene.
“I have to get back downtown. I need the services,” said Beland. “It’s also the money spot for a binner like me.”

Our favourite drug causes major problems

Broken windows. Broken bones. Bar fights that spill out onto the street. The news of drunk young men and the latest harm they’ve caused in the downtown just keeps on coming.
The most recent news is of a Victoria police officer getting his leg broken after drunken young scrappers accidentally toppled him during a brawl outside the Pita Pit takeout restaurant. No doubt we’ll soon be talking again about early closure of the Pita Pit as a “solution,” as if the problem is in the gathering and not the fact that young men are drinking themselves into belligerent oblivion every weekend.
Not every young man is out there getting himself slam-faced drunk in the downtown, of course. Most aren’t. But a significant number are routinely drinking at harmful levels, posing a danger to themselves and anyone who crosses their path. That’s the problem we ought to be trying to fix.
I understand the appeal of alcohol, being a social drinker with a clear memory of how hard I drank myself for a couple of years when I was 14 or so. But that’s not to say I’m blind to alcohol’s many harms.
Even social drinkers risk long-term health problems from a lifetime of steady drinking. I co-wrote a book on addiction for ASPECT B.C. last year, and what lingered for me most from the research into the many drugs we take were alcohol’s powerful, lasting effects on every system of the body and mind.
And that’s just for starters. The one-off harms caused by a single night of drunkenness are legion. Car accidents, beatings, killings, robbery, domestic assault, sexual abuse, infidelity, on and on. We’re capable of immensely stupid and tragic acts when we drink too much.
For pregnant women, alcohol is one of the most dangerous drugs a woman can take in terms of the potential lifelong damage to the baby. It’s a “teratogenic” - a substance capable of crossing the placental wall and wreaking havoc on a developing fetus at the cellular level.
Yet our resistance in Canada even to label alcohol bottles with a warning about that says it all when it comes to the sacred-cow status alcohol enjoys in our society. Case in point: the FASD Community Circle asked the region’s mayors a couple years ago to abstain from alcohol for nine months as a gesture of support for non-drinking pregnant moms, and none of them would do it. (Good on Victoria Coun. Charlayne Thornton-Joe and her husband for jumping in.)
Then again, how many of us would agree to nine months booze-free? The average British Columbian over the age of 15 now consumes more than 500 alcoholic drinks annually. Among college and university students, one in eight binge-drink every weekend. Each year’s alcohol-sales stats show us drinking a little more than the year before, helped along by the 9,000 liquor stores and drinking establishments that now operate in B.C.
OK, so we love the stuff. But we’re going to have to get past that if we want to deal with the larger problems of harmful alcohol use.
UVic’s Centre for Addiction Research (CARBC) and the provincial medical health officer have done excellent work on this topic. They note that by 2002, the costs of alcohol-related problems in B.C. were already exceeding tax revenues from alcohol sales by $61 million a year. We’ve pushed those revenues up a little further every year since then by drinking more, but the alcohol-related harms always seem to increase faster.
CARBC advocates a variable liquor tax tied to the amount of pure alcohol in a particular product. In countries that have tried such taxing strategies, a beer with less alcohol sells for less than one with a higher level, which encourages consumers to buy lower-alcohol brands. The reverse is true right now for some alcoholic beverages in B.C.; coolers, for instance, actually get cheaper as alcohol content increases.
B.C. medical health officer Dr. Perry Kendall has urged the B.C. government to consider the impact of allowing 500 more liquor stores to open in the province in the past seven years, an increase of almost 40 per cent. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that consumption has gone up eight per cent in the same period of time.
We need a campaign - one that motivates through education, price point and prosecution, with particular relevance to the age group causing the bulk of the trouble downtown. We’ve danced around the edges long enough with our debates around pop-up urinals, staggered bar closings, and forced closure of takeout joints for the sin of selling food late at night.
The problem is drunkenness. The solution is less of it.