Doubling the rate for parking meters outside public parks like Kapiolani and Aala would help raise money for park maintenance, but it’s a move that opponents say could spread beyond Waikiki and downtown and keep people out of public parks and beaches.
The city currently charges 50 cents per hour for metered parking around Kapiolani Regional Park and Aala Park between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. A proposal in the city’s budget committee would double the rate to $1 an hour and impose the higher rate 24 hours a day.
"We love the aina and we love our parks," said Peter Whiticar, who is helping to organize opposition to City Council Bill 30. "This will definitely deter local families and serve as a barrier to our access to the outdoors."
While it’s aimed at parking meters around city parks, the plan would particularly affect Waikiki condominium residents who currently park overnight for free in metered stalls around Kapiolani Park.
Instead, the meters would have to be fed every four hours — at a rate of $1 an hour — to prevent getting a $35 parking ticket.
The extra parking revenue would help maintain city parks for everyone, said Al Tufono, the city’s parks and recreation deputy director.
"There is an expectation by the people in our community about how our parks should look," Tufono said Monday. "We don’t want to raise people’s taxes, so we’re trying to find funding streams to upkeep our parks and be able to provide the quality of life that people expect from our parks."
While Bill 30 focuses on Kapiolani and Aala parks, officials are also considering the possibility of imposing — or increasing — parking fees at other popular parks, such as Central Oahu Regional Park, Tufono said.
"We’re not going to rule anything out if this bill passes," he said.
The bill already has been heard twice by the full City Council and is now in the budget committee.
The committee will meet Feb. 8 when Bill 30 could come up again, said committee Chairwoman Ann Kobayashi.
"If we do put it on (the agenda), that doesn’t mean it’ll pass that day, because the issues are so complicated," Kobayashi said. "There’s so much controversy about it, but we are going to open up the discussion again. We want to do what’s fair for the greatest number of people."
The renewed debate over increasing parking fees around city parks comes as the city’s Department of Transportation Services is working separately on plans to replace 232 parking meters in Chinatown with a high-tech system that has the ambitious goals of cutting down on parking tickets, moving cars out of spaces faster and helping Chinatown businesses — all without costing the city any additional money.
A contract between the city and a vendor could be signed next week or the week after, and the new machines could be in place by the end of March, said Wayne Yoshioka, director of the city’s Department of Transportation Services.
The new machines will have sensors to determine whether vehicles are using a stall, and can be easily reprogrammed depending on the parking needs of Chinatown merchants, customers and residents, Yoshioka said.
Once the machines are in place, city officials will solicit feedback and can adjust their time limits accordingly, he said.
"The beauty of these intelligent devices is we can change their (time limit) duration far easier than we can with the mechanical ones," he said.
Residents around Kapiolani Regional Park, meanwhile, have organized an online petition against Bill 30 at goo.gl/6z7Zx.
Whiticar and his wife, Nuria, are among the untold number of Waikiki residents who scramble to find parking every night.
Their condominium provides no parking for either of their vehicles.
Imposing overnight fees of $1 an hour to park "would be devastating for me," Whiticar said. "It would make it almost impossible for us to live there, let alone for a lot of senior citizens on fixed incomes."
Richard Quinn, a retired medical malpractice attorney who lives across from Kapiolani Park, said the city is moving to restrict access to city parks at a time when childhood and adult obesity rates are skyrocketing.
"I walk around Kapiolani Park every day and see families at soccer practice, luaus, birthday parties and surfers going to the beach," Quinn said. "They can’t all afford to pay these higher fees."
John Shockley, a surfer from Makakilo, believes Bill 30 goes far beyond the parking demands around Kapiolani Park.
"The real issue is the freedom of access of all of Hawaii’s people to access parks and beach parks," Shockley said. "I was 12 years old when Hawaii became a state (in 1959), and I always got to go to the beach for free. We’ve got to pass that on to all of Hawaii’s people."
