Will The Feds Please Pay For My Parking?
In the third largest city of Utah, Provo City, residents are suffering from a most egregious shortage, one that requires immediate government intervention. No, they are not suffering for a lack of food, nor are they afflicted by a painful thirst. Instead, the city faces a rather more life-threatening scenario: daily life without enough parking spaces. Senator Bob Bennett of Utah understands the harrowing ordeal that his constituents endure, and has generously offered the hard-earned tax dollars of other Americans so that they can have their misery removed. As such, $475,000 has been offered to Provo City for the construction of a parking garage in Provo City.
Senator Bennett will stop at nothing to get this money to his constituents. No, not even the pleas of local Congressman Jason Chaffetz will dissuade him. Responding to Sen. Bennett’s actions, Congressman Chaffetz remarked that “"I think people inherently recognize that our government shouldn't be in the business of buying a city's parking garage." In another media interview, Chaffetz said that “It is simply not the proper role for the federal government to be funding parking garages for a city.” In effect, Sen. Bennett has forced a taxpayer-funded parking garage onto the residents of Provo, even after they have elected a Congressman who has unequivocally said that they don’t want it. It’s a sad event that is an excellent metaphor for government: force feeding expensive things to citizens that they don’t want, and often, don’t need.
Which brings us to our ‘crisis’. The parking garage will be located in downtown Provo. To investigate the seriousness of the problem, I took a quick trip through historic Provo City, courtesy of Google Streetview. Along the way, I found this enormous parking lot, stretched out as far as the eye can see, just across the street from the selected site.
Following up with a Google Maps satellite search, we find that the area is inundated with parking lots.
Further, there are copious amounts of street parking available in the area, as well as some smaller lots that one cannot pick out from the satellite view. Moreover, nearby Brigham Young University offers hundreds and hundreds of free parking spots, and in 2005, a private development opened up 500 parking spots three short blocks away from the proposed parking lot.
One wonders why citizens in such places as Lakewood, Washington and Sinclair, Wyoming are being pressed to foot the bill for parking in Provo City, Utah. After all, parking can be a very privately profitable venture. A recent municipal decision to charge residents for parking in a small area of the North and South Joaquin neighbourhoods of Provo has led to annual revenues of nearly a quarter million dollars.
Following my assiduous investigation, I am happy to conclude that we can all rest easy – it seems like this monstrous disaster-in-waiting has been halted before it had a chance to impose more devastating consequences on us all. Perhaps this was all a joke – perhaps Sen. Bennett was just taking us all for a ride. Either way, I think this is one case of pork-barrel politics that we can all agree should have been parked.