One of the documents prepared by the Portland Parks Bureau, and passed on to me by the Knower of All Things, gives a clue to why the Bureau wants to charge Portlanders to park in Washington Park. The reason isn't, as I archly speculated yesterday, that the Parks Bureau wants to discourage East Portlanders from using Washington Park. Rather, it goes back to the construction of the West Side Light Rail 15 years ago. It turns out that in 1997, Metro borrowed $5 million, which it contributed to the cost of building the Zoo light rail station and other improvements to the Zoo parking lot. Metro operates the Zoo, and expected that revenues from the Zoo parking lot would be available to repay the $5 million. As it happened, the revenues weren't available. Here's how the City's phrased it:
WHEREAS, in 1997, METRO issued debt instruments in the amount of $4,940,000, in order to contribute to the cost of the construction of the light rail station at the Main Parking Lot and construction of improvements and modifications to the Main Parking Lot, which debt was expected to be repaid using the proceeds of parking fees to be paid by users of the Main Parking Lot, but was not so repaid (“Metro Bond Repayment”);
The joker in this deck is that although the City owns the Zoo parking lot, Metro has leased it from the City since 1979 and the lease doesn't expire until 2014. Metro could have charged for parking any time it wished. It's not that the revenues weren't available to Metro, but that Metro didn't bother to collect them. (The lot actually has booths and gates for collecting parking revenues. I've never seen them staffed, but they may have been used sporadically for a while.)
This makes the City's parking plan a little more mysterious: Metro's been entitled to charge for Zoo parking for years, but hasn't; Metro's unhappy that it hasn't been collecting the parking fees; so the City is going to charge visitors everywhere in Washington Park to make up for this. Something's not quite right here. Perhaps someone in the parking meter business needs the repeat business?
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