Wave your wand 

Is parking the hot-button issue of the 2024 election cycle?

Homelessness? Nah. It's not as important as stopping what some San Luis Obispo city residents labeled the parking "Gestapo" at a recent community meeting on the controversial parking rate increase that keeps on giving. Why is it that parking enforcement officers are always compared to Nazis?

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That's dramatic. They're not trying to kill you. Your parking meter money ran out, so they're enforcing the rules. Getting a $45 ticket after paying $8 for two hours of parking may feel like murder, but it really isn't.

The parking rates are ridiculous, though. So ridiculous that elected officials' jobs are on the line—that is, if irate business owners are your measure of San Luis Obispo residents' sentiment and if you've got a little "bibbidi-bobbidi-boo."

"I think if I had a magic wand, I would have a recall petition to get rid of every [SLO] City Council member," Hemp Shak and Euphoria co-owner Steven Wick announced to applause at the Feb. 13 community meeting.

"If I had a magic wand, I would recall all the City Council members as well," Blackwater owner Maryalice Hamilton said.

I've got great news for them! You don't need any wand-waving to get a recall petition going. You just need to fill out paperwork, get signatures, and meet some deadlines (which is hard for some, such as the tighty-righties attempting to recall 2nd District Supervisor Bruce Gibson). Then, bibbidi-bobbidi, you've got a recall on the ballot.

What's up with the magic wand references? Parking consultant Julie Dixon (aka, SLO's Fairy Godmother), who ran the community meeting, encouraged residents to use a wand as their guide to say what they would "change, fix, or improve" about parking in the city.

It seems pretty simple to me: $4 an hour is just too much, and the $5 an hour SLO plans to hike its rates to in 2025 is downright robbery. Just. Don't. Do. It.

Meanwhile, the city of SLO is claiming that it started doing a parking study this year because it wanted to make sure parking rates mirrored the needs of community members. Wow! What a gracious city, to want rates to mirror residents' needs. Public relations work can do amazing things, can't it?

Too bad pulling the wool over our eyes would take a nonexistent magic wand.

I guess the complete uproar from residents and business owners after the city doubled parking rates last year had nothing to do with the city's recent efforts to "find out" what residents need from downtown parking. In five days, the parking study more than tripled its responses compared to a 2022 study.

Suddenly, people are paying attention to city parking policy. All SLO had to do was double public parking rates: bibbidi-bobbidi-boo. Turns out, residents don't want to pay for a fourth parking garage downtown if it means $2 more an hour for parking.

"I've dealt with a lot of challenges in my career," Dixon told the more than two dozen residents at the community meeting. "You just have a lot of them in one place."

Paso Robles Joint Unified School District also has a lot of challenges in one place. The boondoggle that is Georgia Brown Elementary School is another controversy that keeps on giving. We're in our third year of publicly squabbling about that campus's future, and students finally have a path forward—maybe?

With that district, you never know. One meeting's decision could be another meeting's reversal. Take-backsies are a thing in that district.

I'm sure if everyone in that school district could wave a wand, they would make the geological anomaly that magically appeared under Georgia Brown's campus last year disappear. But Fairy Godmothers aren't a thing in that district, and reality is.

So the elementary school's dual immersion program and its students are moving to Lewis Middle School for the 2024-25 school year, which means that Lewis Middle School's current occupants are also moving. They're moving to Flamson Middle School, but the district doesn't have the transportation options to accommodate for the game of musical chairs its students will be playing in six months.

"These things have a ripple effect," board member Kenney Enney said at the meeting. "I don't like playing survivor with the community, which is exactly what we are doing."

Unfortunately, Enney, the district is literally in survival mode because the board doesn't have a knack for making a decision and sticking to it. If the board had simply made the decision to close the school a couple of years ago, even amid community pressure not to—and thought about what to do with the district's sole dual immersion program in the process—the district would neither be playing "survivor" with the community nor its budget. It would have taken the time to figure it out before a geological anomaly started playing chicken with the campus.

Not that anyone could have predicted that, but I have to rant about something, amirite?

So what is the district going to do about it?

Don't ask current Superintendent Curt Dubost. He's retiring! He said his staff won't even give him recommendations about how to fix the district's current pickle, because they don't want to be left holding the bag. Wow. Δ

The Shredder is waiting for a magic wand. Send one to [email protected].