City Council suspends parking district program to focus on repairs

Crews work on damaged sidewalk in Golden Hill Photo courtesy of the city of San Diego The San Diego City Council agreed Monday to pause a portion of its parking management transformation package passed earlier this year to use otherwise allocated funds for streetlight sidewalk and other infrastructure repairs The million collected in the city s Population Parking District plan will go toward making the repairs in the communities from which the funds were gathered Downtown Uptown Mid-City and Pacific Beach In June the council approved a sweeping parking amendment package intended to improve efficiency and transparency However much of the money collected in parking districts was tied up in other costs and only around could be expended on infrastructure repairs Monday s council action frees up the money to complete various badly needed repairs by waiving the CPD programs for the next two fiscal years There s no shortage of work that demands to get done in these parking districts and we can maximize the impact of this meter revenue by using city crews to make repairs that San Diegans are asking for disclosed Bethany Bezak director of the city s transportation department Streetlights are a perfect example There are over outages in Downtown right now that have been requested by residents and businesses and this council action will unlock the materials we need to eliminate that backlog More than of the freed-up cash will head towards the Downtown CPD for Uptown for Mid-City and for Pacific Beach An internal review conducted by the transportation department this year unveiled several issues with how funds have been managed and documented In fiscal year the share of revenues available for CPD organizations was million but CPDs were only able to expend around million In April the San Diego County Grand Jury circulated a summary calling on the city to disband the CPDs noting the CPDs do not meet the transparency requirements of their agreements with the city and spend a essential percentage of allotted revenues on administrative costs and create unnecessary layers of bureaucracy among other findings Starting Tuesday crews will begin the backlogged repairs in parking district neighborhoods and will address infrastructure projects in other areas in the coming weeks according to a city declaration