No Free Parking For Christmas

If you were hoping to park for free Downtown to do some last minute shopping in the final days leading up to Christmas you are going to need to plug the meter or the app.

Council voted to receive and file a request by the Moose Jaw and District Chamber of Commerce to have the City provide free parking for December 21 - 24. The move was made after the Chamber wrote Council asking to withdrew their request.

The Chamber made the initial request at Council's October 25th meeting but Council voted 4 - 2 to defer any decision on free parking until they had received input from the Downtown Business Association (DBA).

Council deferred the decision to its December 6th meeting to allow the DBA to discuss the issue at its next board meeting.

“I think there was some second thought about the Christmas parking situation. I don’t know the details. I was not privy to the discussion between the Downtown business people and the Chamber (of Commerce). I suspect they realized it was a good idea to keep the parking the same as it has always been so that encourages people to park and then move on,” Mayor Clive Tolley said when asked about the issue in the post Council media scrum.

Although he had not spoken to the Chamber of Commerce about the reasoning behind withdrawing their request the Mayor felt that too many people abused the free parking making it difficult for some businesses to have ready customer access to their stores.

“Every time in the past that I know of in the past when we suspended fees for parking we had problems with people leaving their vehicles for a long time in front of businesses and it has had the adverse effect rather than free shopping it has been more difficult to get free parking,” Mayor Tolley said.

Asked if he would have liked to have seen free parking Downtown and would it have increased the number of shoppers he said he was not in favour of it.

“I think our new parking app is working really well. I used it myself when I was Christmas shopping and I was in a store and I realize my parking meter was about to expire and I could use the parking app to extend my time my vehicle was at the parking spot,” Mayor Tolley said adding he personally encouraged people to use the parking app and if they are about to run out of time just top the meter off.

“Then they can extend their time and when they are done shopping or their dining and when it is time to move out of there so somebody else has the opportunity to park there and get into a business.”

The Chamber never supplied any reason why they cancelled their request.