Photo with permission from sparikh109.

Last week, the Montgomery County Council held a hearing on the second leg of their two-part strategy to restore Ride-On bus service cuts. The first part was to raise parking fees in the Bethesda parking district, fees which only rose once in the last twenty years and haven’t kept up with inflation or Metro fares. Next, the Council must approve transferring money out of the parking district and applying it to Ride-On.

Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett’s Director of Finance, Jennifer Barrett, spoke against the plan. Strangely, she argued that parking district money must only go to projects that “enhance parking services or manage parking demand.” But transit does just that. Every person who arrives by bus is one who doesn’t need to park at the destination, saving money, space, and pollution. Barrett said,

[Leggett] is opposed to the legislation because it represents a fundamental change in the authorized use of Parking Lot District fees. Expedited Bill 17-09 would, for the first time, allow PLD fees to be siphoned off for services that do not contribute in a direct way to the function of the Parking Lot Districts nor would these services provide or enhance parking services or manage parking demand.

Financially sound PLDs ensure that the costs of important parts of the infrastructure supporting our central business districts are borne by the business property owners and parking users in the PLDs. These costs are paid by the business owners through property taxes, and by the users of the parking facilities through parking fees and fines. The Parking Lot Districts were created to ensure that these costs are not borne by the general taxpayers of the County. The County Executive believes that it is prudent and appropriate to ensure that continues to be the case, and believes that this legislation puts that very goal at risk.

According to Transit First!, however, this is false. The parking districts don’t save taxpayers from bearing the cost of parking, because while taxpayers pay for the roads in the parking districts, they don’t receive the revenue back from on-street meters as they do elsewhere in the county. Likewise, the county garages don’t pay real estate taxes. Technically, it’s true that the parking district pays for the garages instead of taxpayers, but taxpayers gave up revenue they would otherwise receive, making the parking district more of an accounting sleight of hand than an actual self-sustaining entity.

Leggett and Barrett also warned about the dangers to the districts’ bond ratings from taking away money. However, suborning more important policy priorities just to secure a fiscal entity that locks up considerable money for the sole purpose of building garages makes no sense. If the county dedicated all property taxes in Potomac to a special authority whose only mission was to erect statues of County Executives past and present on every street corner, that entity would probably have a great bond rating too. However, it wouldn’t be able to do anything valuable with the bonds, and would be locking away money the county needs for other purposes.

Montgomery’s parking districts use the wrong model. They underprice parking and siphon other revenue that would otherwise go to general purposes and force it to go to parking garage construction alone. Instead, Montgomery should look to the Transportation Enhancement Districts pioneered by Donald Shoup, such as those in Pasadena, California. Those districts use parking revenue to benefit the surrounding community in other ways. They can beautify the streetscape, or fund other means of transportation to help workers and shoppers reach the area without needing more and larger garages.