Swami:
Someone told me Waukegan is backing off that downtown parking plan that scared everyone away from parking (or doing anything else) downtown. When will they scrap the whole thing and blame it on an out-of-touch consultant?
Stevie, Wondering in Waukegan
Dear Stevie Wonder:
The Swami likes your thinking. It has been a public relations nightmare for Waukegan ever since some bean-counter told them to put the screws to on-street parking outside the empty restaurants and mostly-dark Genesee Theatre. The surest way to make sure people never venture east of Green Bay Road ever again is to hit them with a $20 parking ticket and make them feel like a sucker for taking a chance on Waukegan.
And Swami never saw the logic in sticking Hussey's Downtown Tavern on the south end of Genesee -- which is so dormant that you could fire a cannon and never hit a parked car -- and then nickel-and-diming-and-quartering its customers back to Kenosha County.
Talk about the law of unintended consequences. All those extra coins in the meters can never buy back a lost consumer.
But Waukegan's burgermeisters are slowly seeing the light. The 9 p.m. parking limit, enacted in November, became 7 p.m. in March, and now the business community is asking for that to become 5 p.m., along with cutting the fines in half and extending the free-parking window for people who want to gulp-and-git.
Using that geometric progression, your Swami predicts that the city, by September, will be paying visitors 25 cents an hour to pretty-please come downtown and see a show, maybe grab a bite. And it will be money well-spent.
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