On the same night the City Council unanimously agreed to jack up parking prices for the first time in 9 years, members inserted a nickel into their own favorite parking meters and, happily for those who think industriousness is overrated, out came a card marked “Hiatus II.”
Freshly returned from a 2-week hiatus, the City Council will skip meeting next Monday in tribute to the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.
This down time, however, will not slow implementation of a city-wide raise in hourly parking meter rates, from 50 cents to $1.
Fighting off mild pushback — as anticipated — only 2 Downtown-adjacent businesses protested.
The perceived overdue increase was propelled by at least two motivations:
- To catch up to the rates surrounding communities are charging.
- Optimists in City Hall project that the current annual parking meter revenue of $600,000 will leap by almost $500,000 once the increase goes into effect, presumably later this autumn.
While the intended new streamlining strategy remains incomplete, and contains numerous moving parts — variables — the City Council’s announced intention is to blanket Culver City in parking meters and correct earlier oversights or favors.
For reasons that remain cloudy to some persons, parking meters have been planted around town in uneven patterns, on one block, but not the next, and then they resume again.
Better yet, meters are on one side of the street in a commercial district but not on the other.
It is anticipated that, within weeks, such unevenness will go the way of the 50 cents hourly parking rates.
On Another Subject
Acor, City Hall’s permanently mysterious citizens group — the acronym stands, bulkily, for Advisory Committee on Redevelopment — continues to live in the attic, not the main living quarters, of city officials.
Years after the first committee was organized, it receded into the background and has remained there since, not much on the minds of persons beyond its membership.
Acor’s present roster is cloaked in as much fogginess as its arcane history.
While the City Council continues to wrestle with the core of Acor’s seemingly abstract mission, members are steering a course that is, to be charitable, uncertain.
Seems that two openings existed last May. The activist Meghan Sahli Wells and the incumbent Scott Voelz applied.
Between them, they could have starved to death waiting for City Hall to call back and say yay or nay. Neither party’s telephone has rung in the last 4 months.
For reasons that were elusive, the Council made an executive decision last night and named Ms. Wells to the Acor board while Mr. Voelz’s candidacy was left lingering in political purgatory, its fate unknown, even to those in control.
