BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI News and Commentary

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, WEDNESDAY OCT. 12, 2016) — City officials who brought back metered parking justify it by citing the public meetings held a couple years ago.

You know how that exercise goes in Pittsfield.:

1. The Suits want a public policy changed, irrespective of the benefits to the city or the cost to consumers and taxpayers.
2. The politicians go to work at the behest of their masters.
3. They call “public meetings,” most often at times and places inconvenient to citizens.
4. Sometimes these meetings are illegal.
5. The effect is to rig the meeting to suppress true public input.
6. When a handful of supercitizens show up address the board, commission, or committee, they are marginalized if not ignored.
7. The measure passes, and the city’s “leaders” crow about how everything was done “above board.”

Pittsfield, Madame Mayor, Ain’t Lake George or Hyannis

At-large councilor Pete White and others shamelessly offer the “we had public meetings” defense. Their second line is to liken downtown Pittsfield to Lake George, Northampton, Hyannis, and other cities that have metered parking. This is the “Denial Approach,” a linchpin attitude that insists against available evidence that downtown Pittsfield is alive and well, a veritable hotspot of activity, life, commerce, vibrancy, and dynamism. In fact, as any visitor fast realizes, a trip “upstreet” guarantees a maddening experience of traffic delays, litter, dust, inching traffic, mass confusion, no parking spaces, ugliness (epitomized by electrical boxes uglified by amateurs who “Know Someone”), jaywalkers, and the presence of the walking dead.

Commentators on THE PLANET have given the best explanation for the installation of parking kiosks, with prices ranging from 50 cents to $3 an hour: City officials are doing it to show they have you by the short hairs. They’re doing it because they can.

THE PLANET can already hear the sniping of city officials, who will point out that the most the city will charge for the “privilege” of parking downtown will be $1 an hour. That’s technically correct, but we point out what no other local press outlet has done, namely, that when the mayor’s office introduced the plan, it said $1/hr. would be the highest rate “for now.”

“For now.”

In other words, once the meters get installed this month and the kinks come out, the rates will jump.

And by the way, you better have a sock full of quarters with you, because the Pittsfield system will not accept folding money — just to make it that much more inconvenient. THE PLANET can tell you of one vibrant city with metered parking, Syracuse, New York. In Syracuse, you find a city that has successfully reinvented itself in the same time frame that the city of Pittsfield has nosedived. Whether it’s downtown, Armory Square, or on campus at  glorious SU, in Syracuse you will find activities and destinations that justify meters. Oh, and Syracuse’s kiosks take folding money. It’s called convenience.

Lockstep with Nazi Stormtroopers

“We’ve Got the World By the Kisok” is that wonderful joint production brought to you by Pittsfield’s corner office and the city council, marching as lockstep as those Nazi stormtroopers in grainy footage from a mid-30s party rally. It was Mayor Linda Tyer’s idea to put metered parking along that long death march between South Street at the Colonial Theater to Berkshire Medical Center. The council, in a 10-0 whitewash (Lisa Tully not present) approved. The law firm of Morandi, Caccamo, Connell, Rivers, Krol, Simonelli, White, Marchetti, Amuso, and Mazzeo went along like whipped puppies, providing Mary Jane and Joe Kapanski zero representation and even less leadership.

So how should a city like Pittsfield handle parking? Here’s how you don’t handle it:

• Accept state’s millions and the fine print that goes with it (like accepting druggies and gangsters)
• Tear up downtown for four years straight.
• Make sure the re-design eliminates 30% of the existing parking spaces.
• Lose more parking by allowing a private company (Hotel on North) exclusive rights to six on-street spaces.
• Charge for parking at a destination that most of us want to avoid.

Pittsfield has enough parking spaces. It doesn’t have enough leadership. Meanwhile, take Henny Youngman’s advice. If you want to solve the problem, but a parked car and leave it there.

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“If you don’t know, the thing to do is not get scared but to learn.” — Ayn Rand

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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