By Kevin Ma
Michener Place residents want city council to stop giving them tickets for parking on their own street.
Lynda Holden presented a petition to St. Albert council June 7 signed by her fellow Michener Place residents that called for the creation of a residential parking pass program.
The city created a no-parking zone around Michener around 1980 at the request of residents in order to keep students from the nearby St. Albert Catholic High from taking up all the parking spots, Holden said in an interview.
The zone is active from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on school days, and covers all of Michener and a portion of the nearby Malmo Avenue.
The restriction means that residents and their guests cannot park in front of their own homes for much of the year.
"We cannot have family over, services to our homes provided or homecare assistance provided without being hassled or ticketed by bylaw," Holden told council.
Residents have spent the last 25 years juggling cars and borrowing driveways to host book clubs and visitors and still get tickets, Holden said in an interview. One neighbour reports getting ticketed weekly as he has two cars and a driveway with room for one. Another senior told her that any contractor she calls always gets ticketed when they work on her house, and she has to pay the ticket.
Holden said the last straw came recently when her son Nick came over to drop off his three young kids for babysitting. In the 15 minutes it took him to unload the car and their bags, he got an $80 parking ticket.
"I just said, 'This is enough,'" she said, and she organized the petition.
Holden said residents have repeatedly called for a residential parking pass program over the years, only to have the bylaw office reply it would be too complicated to implement.
"This is not something new. Every municipality has it."
Holden also noted that the city has already put up some "resident parking only" signs up by the Sturgeon Hospital.
The city does not currently have any way of telling if any one vehicle is authorized to be in a residents-only parking zone or not, transportation manager Dean Schick told council.
While the city did not have a residential parking pass program, city administration did have a pass program in place for its employee-only spots in the St. Albert Place parking lot, said city chief administrative officer Chris Jardine.
Coun. Bob Russell noted that the City of Edmonton had a parking pass program and used it in many areas.
"If it's working somewhere, why not use it?"
Mayor Nolan Crouse suggested caution, noting that such a program could affect many school neighbourhoods with similar parking issues.
Coun. Cathy Heron gave notice of motion that she would call for a best-practices report on resolving parking conflicts near schools and other areas, one that would examine parking passes, ticket forgiveness, and licence plate registration.
Parking passes are probably the best and simplest solution, Heron said in an interview, and residents near Bellerose Composite and the Sturgeon Hospital have called for them. She wanted to hear more about the logistics of a pass program (e.g. costs, how many passes per home) before supporting one, however.
Coun. Sheena Hughes gave notice of motion that she would ask administration to create a parking pass program. She later amended the motion to call for a pilot study of parking passes at Michener Place, with administration to report to council on its results by early 2018.
"There's more involved than just handing out a parking pass," she said in an interview, and she wanted staff to figure out the logistics before a citywide rollout. Michener was a good test ground as residents there were already interested in passes.
While she was glad council was looking into this issue, she said this parking problem was very frustrating to her neighbours.
"We're already paying huge taxes and now we're paying to park on our own street."
