Never mind the Saturday-parking snafu: Here are 3 other ways Winnipeg has effectively gouged motorists

In downtown Winnipeg, you may enjoy two free hours of parking on a Saturday. Provided it's raining at the time. During Passover. And a rare swallow-tailed kite happens to be flying overhead.

While this maysound ludicrous, it's only slightly more ridiculous than the City of Winnipeg's actual Saturday downtown-parkingpolicy, which has been described in charitable terms asvague and less charitably as deliberately deceitful.

For the past five years, downtown parking pay stationshave been emblazoned with stickers advertising "two hours complimentary on Saturday."

The stickers do not specify whether these two free hours come before you must pay for parking, after you pay for parking, or during some possible future when the polar ice caps melt, the oceans rise and Toronto-based hockey writersrecognize that Blake Wheeler and Mark Scheifele deserve to be considered elite NHL forwards.

What this means is Winnipeg spent the past five years offering free parking to some downtown visitors on Saturdays while happily acceptingloonies and tooniesfrom people who either didn't see the little, blue rectangle stickers or didn't understand them.

At best, this amounted to lousy messaging. At worst, it was deliberately misleading.

• 'Confusing' signage around free parking sees dozens of tickets handed out in Exchange District: resident
• Winnipeg to stop handing out Saturday tickets until drivers have 'clarity' on downtown free parking: Wardrop

But this imprecise bit of advertising appeared to become something altogether more sinisterthe Saturday before Christmas, when contractors working on behalf ofthe Winnipeg Parking Authority began handing out tickets to motorists who did not pay for two hours of Saturday parking as soon as they left their vehicles.

The about-face sparked immediate outrage from motorists. And it was apparently reversed within days through a decree by Winnipeg chief transportation and utilities officer Dave Wardrop, a senior city bureaucrat whose portfolio includes the WPA.

On the surface, it may be tempting to blame the parking authority for this change in policy. As aspecial operating agency, the WPA is supposed to operate somewhat independently and has on occasion surprised bureaucrats and elected officials alike.

But the authority can be directed to provide more revenue for the city. On no fewer than three recent occasions, Winnipeg's elected officialshave madedecisions that effectively siphoned parking revenue away for other purposes.

Parking revenue paying for demolition

The first of those decisions was made in 2016, when the WPA was handed the $1.8-million task of demolishing the Civic Centre Parkade.

The Princess Street parkade, located within sight of city hall, was shuttered in 2012 due to structural concerns andwas effectively marked for death when the city made the financially disastrous decision to abandon the Public Safety Building for a new police headquarters on Graham Avenue.

• Winnipeg Parking Authority to spend $1.8M to demolish derelict Civic Centre Parkade
• Cost of demolishing old police HQ and parkade 6 times more than previously disclosed

On one hand, it may sound logical to ask the parking authority to demolish one of its own assets. On the other hand, it could be argued the $1.8-million price tag for itsdemolition, never mind other associated remediation costs, should have been anticipated as part of the new police headquarters budget.

That budget was approved by city council at $135million in 2009. It eventually rose to $213.5 million, thanks to scope inflation and cost overruns at a project that has been under RCMP investigation for more than three years.

• With interest, police-HQ project to cost taxpayers $357M by middle of century

The city could have handed the demolition task to its property department or one of its offshoots, municipal accommodations, which manages city buildings. By giving this job to the parking authority, it effectively diverts $1.8 million worth of parking revenue into a capital project.

City raids parkade sale money

But that decision pales in comparison to an even more dramaticfinancial decision undertaken this fall, when Mayor Brian Bowman and council finance chair Scott Gillinghamput together the 2018 budget.

Winnipeg's spending plan for next year calls for the cancellation of a six-year-old city plan to devote $5 million toward the construction of a parkade on the east side of the Exchange District.

• Winnipeg to abandon East Exchange parkade and spend most of the money on trees instead

In 2011, council voted to set aside this money, which was part of a $23.6-millionwindfall the city realized when it sold the Winnipeg Square Parkade, a facility former St. Boniface councillor Dan Vandal called "the gold mine at Portage and Main."

When the parkade was sold, council promised to spend the proceeds on parking improvements. As of last year, $10 million of cash sitting in the city's land operating reserve was still considered "payable to the Winnipeg Parking Authority."

Council, however, voted this month to siphon away half that money and effectively kill the East Exchange Parkade. While some of the cash will be spent on street improvements on both sides of the Exchange, the bulk of the raided reserve $3.5 million will be used to top up the city's urban forestry budget.

At budget time, parking authority chief operating officer RandyTopolniski made it clear this was not his agency's decision.

Raiseparking rates to hold off transit cuts

But city council's whimsy when it came to parking revenue didn't stop there. The very same 2018 budget, whichinitially called for increasing downtown parking rates by $1 an hour, was later amended to boost hourly parking rates by $1.50 an hour in order to stave off Winnipeg Transit cuts.

• Transit cuts off the table thanks to $1.50/hour parking price hike

The $1-an-hour boost was supported by the Downtown Winnipeg Business Improvement Zone, which has long recognized that boosting the price of on-street parking helps drive all-day parkers onto surface-parking lots and into parkades.

But the $1.50-an-hour hike, devised several days before a council budget vote, was denounced by both the Downtown Winnipeg BIZ and the Exchange District BIZ as excessive and unsupported by research.

That is a nice way of calling the hike a cash grab, even if it does amount to robbing motorist Peter to pay transit-using Paul.

But the sum total of this parking-rate hike, the diversion of the Exchange parkade money and the addition of the Civic Centre demolition costs amounts to a multi-million-dollar parking-revenue gouge undertaken by elected officials.

That makes a single-weekendSaturday-parking cash grab pale in comparison, as heinous as that may seem on its own.