Parking in downtown SLO is such a hot-button issue that it took up five hours of the Nov. 7 SLO City Council meeting. Why? Well, obviously, charging people $4 a hour to park downtown is way too much. Way too much.
And the thought of increasing that hourly rate to $5 in 2025 is more than most business owners and residents can bear. Everyone is pissed. Everyone. Except for the two guys who spoke up at the meeting advocating for parking rate increases and more residents to take the bus.
The audience members shared a lot of thumbs down in response to those comments. Apparently, buses are out. Cars are in. Parking costs are up. And something needs to give.
As in the city needs to give in. Which they’re doing, kind of.
Taking a page out of the policies they had before the costs of building a fourth parking garage downtown ballooned to $53 million and SLO needed to take out a $47 million loan to pay for it, the council decided everyone gets their first hour of parking free in both garages and on the street. They also decided that Sundays are free all day in structures.
So, Sunday funday is back, baby! Bring that car, park it in the garage, get day drunk, and leave it—just make sure you’re back before 10 a.m. on Monday, because you could get an almost $50 ticket. Ouch!
There was probably a way to avoid this predicament. A way of paying for and planning for this parking garage that’s been in the works for more than a decade that didn’t involve heaping costs on downtown SLO’s visitors. But what do I know about forward-thinking?
Maybe we should ask Paso Robles, a city so forward-thinking that its council members got ahead of a potential political problem before it became an issue. A standard health order from the SLO County Public Health Department requiring influenza and COVID-19 vaccines or masking for health care workers in the county riled up the anti-everything agitators in the county.
It’s a cause that Paso City Councilmember Chris Bausch couldn’t help but jump on board with. He had to take a stand against masks, you know? For the children. Oh wait, that was when he was on the Paso Robles Joint Unified School District board. Who’s he standing up for now?
“The phone calls I’ve gotten over the last couple of weeks and just running into people around town have made it clear this is very important,” said Bausch, who proposed the resolution for the Nov. 7 meeting.
I’m pretty sure those mandates aren’t going to happen again when it comes to COVID-19. We’ve been living with maskless COVID-19 spreaders for a couple of years now and made it through case increases and decreases without calls to shut down the economy again.
It would take a truly heinous virus to cause our politicians to shut down the economy.
But Bausch and his ilk on the Paso council aren’t going to let the nonissue issue get them down. On Nov. 7, they unanimously passed a resolution declaring that all businesses in Paso were essential (all businesses matter) and that masking was up to individual preference (which it already is, unless you choose to work in health care).
“They are afraid that their business licenses will be revoked,” Bausch said. “I hope this statement will give them reassurance that we will do all we can to ensure that all businesses are essential businesses.”
What a relief!
You know who isn’t relieved? Cuesta College Superintendent and President Jill Stearns. She’s been singing the praises of the 1,300-housing unit and more Dana Reserve project in Nipomo, touting the space it’s allocating to a new South County campus for the college, and advocating for all the “affordable” housing it’s going to bring to the area.
“This property aligns very well with the needs of Cuesta College for a South County location,” she said at a recent SLO County Planning Commission meeting.
But Cuesta’s faculty feels extremely differently—so extreme, in fact, that the college’s academic senate felt the need to push back against the idea that all of Cuesta supports the project. Not only that, a member of the college’s South County Task Force said the project hadn’t come before the task force, which is supposed to advise the college about what’s best for the region.
“It kind of speaks volumes when you’re not bringing these decisions to faculty, and I think the reason they didn’t want to bring it to faculty is because they knew we’d be in opposition,” said task force member and Cuesta College English professor Wesley Sims.
Sims said most of the college’s faculty was in the dark about Cuesta’s role in the Dana Reserve project until recently, when it came before the academic senate, which voted to take a stand against the reserve due to environmental concerns (like chopping down 3,000 mature oak trees) and cultural concerns (like indigenous sites that it said should be protected and aren’t).
“I feel like Cuesta is getting a really bad name by the admin. who are supporting this publicly,” Sims said.
So the faculty publicly rebuked Stearns for her support and spread the word. Δ
Ain’t politics grand? Send the Shredder your thoughts at shredder@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Nov 9-19, 2023.