OrilliaMatters welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is from downtown Orillia business owner Ellen Wolper.
It has long been asked for — granting free access to disabled citizens at all metered spots downtown.
There are a limited number of designated spots and the city will say more spots are available than legally necessary. They insist that free disabled parking spots can only be made available at intersections where the sidewalk is sloped to the street. Yet Orillia has a greater population of seniors, people with disabilities, and now with COVID, lots of unknowns about the impact of long COVID.
Orillia is also promoting itself as “retirement” living, built for seniors. And the associated costs with being disabled? People are living on lower/fixed incomes and having to spend more money for the equipment it takes to live a more mobile life.
Not everyone in a wheelchair/mobility device needs to ramp up or roll down a sloped sidewalk. For many it’s an issue of stamina. They can step up a curb but can’t walk long distances or halfway up the street to get to Becker Shoes, for example, or they can’t manage a slope.
When downtown Orillia has so little going for it, at least let’s have people with mobility issues able to park right at the store they want to shop or the medical office they need. It would set us apart from the big-box stores and the mall and move us towards a more equitable and inclusive city in our larger mandate towards “equity, diversity and inclusion.”
And legislative services/bylaw already knows this about shoppers with disabilities. A couple of years ago they went around to all the parking meters and shortened them. Why? So that anyone, whether they are in a wheelchair or on a scooter, could see down into the meter to pay.
Is this really Orillia’s idea of equity and inclusion — to ensure that everyone is able to pay for parking? I would like to know who ordered the lowering of all the parking meters. On the one hand, bylaw made the parking meters accessible to all but refuses to believe that there should be ‘free’ choice where to park. (Pardon the pun.)
Then the issue of fake permits is also put forward as an excuse not to offer free parking everywhere.
In addition, the “abuse and counterfeit of the accessible parking permits has the potential to be a significant issue as seen in other municipalities where accessible permit holders are able to park for free in municipal parking areas.”
So, rather than pursue the counterfeit permits, bylaw would rather not deal with them? To what other aspect of illegal activity do you say, “Meh, let’s let this pass?” They don’t give a pass to those with “esthetic” sign issues or graffiti or people parking on their own property or opaque garbage bags even so far as using resources and taking people to court. Why not enforce this of all the things they could enforce?
Think of how progressive Orillia would finally be and look to visitors. This would be a much better use of bylaw when the average officer costs the system $100,000 with salary, vehicle, uniform, and equipment. Maybe some efficiencies can be made within this city department.
And the article goes on to say, “In essence, such a policy, the report says, will not alter the stock of ‘accessible’ spots, meaning permit holders will have to park farther away.”
Bylaw’s lobbying to raise the rates at meters recently has done a good job of increasing the ‘stock.’
By raising the rates at meters, business has slowed right down in what is supposed to be our peak season. We pay a higher rate of property tax for location yet get little for this location. We can’t go all summer like this until they “revisit” parking again. If it took only a few weeks to decide to raise prices, then it can be days to turn around and offer this. And in the “spirit of equity,” able-bodied drivers and passengers can get some free parking in city lots off Coldwater and Colborne streets.
Since Mississaga Street has been cleared by the new parking rates, let’s be “inclusive” and give incentive to all to shop downtown. Bracebridge, among many others, does this. The streets have already been paved, the spots are already there, everyone else enjoys free parking/extra parking at the end of their driveway/on their streets after all.
I say this also because city hall has free 30-minute parking (the time it takes to do business there; more time needed for us downtown, though). And when city hall needed more accessible spaces, it happened quickly.
The cost and the loss of revenue were acceptable. Someone had gotten a ticket in the lot opposite the main doors because they could not handle the slope of spaces beside the main door. Logical accommodations were made. If city hall can afford the expense for people with wheelchairs to do business at city hall, then it can be afforded for us downtown. It is understood as the cost of doing business and there are far more essential services offered downtown.
And finally, back to the idea that permit parking spots can only be located at intersections. In winter, some of those spots are the most poorly plowed as the big plows can’t turn into the spot easily — for example, the spot outside P.D. Murphy’s.
They can’t carve out the snow and then those spots aren’t augmented by the smaller sidewalk plows later. People are parking halfway into the street, and then expected to double back to the corner, walking or rolling through the street. Merchants and sidewalk plows often carve out passageways through the snow banks along the street so that there are safer access points all along Mississaga and side streets downtown.
So, please, city council, do something for downtown residents and merchants, some equity for us and oversight of city staff on your part with bylaws and legislative services. It is you who we elected to care for us; you are in charge. Please, no more barriers to business or to access business, and a rollback, so to speak (again, pardon the pun) of poor and costly decisions made on our behalf without our knowledge and input.
Ellen Wolper
Orillia
