Sarasota’s parking program has spent the summer inventing new ways to make people angry. On Monday a Main Street business owner walked into City Hall with National Safety Council statistics, two funerals and a liability warning, and told the commission the safest way to park in its garages is now a $50 ticket.
—At 9:08 a.m., before the Benderson tower, before the historic preservation report, before anyone on the dais had finished their coffee, Vice Mayor Kathy Kelley Ohlrich called the second citizen of the day to the podium. “Chip, I’ll give it a shot, Beeman,” she said, and after something inaudible from the floor, “No, I’m not.” The room laughed. It would not laugh again for a while.
“Chip Beeman, business owner on Main Street,” he said. “Talk to you about parking, kind of.”
—The Arroyo Fix, Undone
—Beeman’s complaint was specific and, by his account, old. Years ago he sat down with then-Commissioner Erik Arroyo and “explained to him the dangers of head-in parking and making you back out.” Arroyo, he said, “was able to get the council or the commission together and change that,” and the city’s garages allowed drivers to back into spaces.
—Not anymore. “The city changed the back-in parking in the garages back to no backing in,” Beeman said. And the reversal came with an invoice. “Not only is back-in parking changed now, but it’s also gone to $50 as a safety thing.”
—He let the phrase hang there. “Let me tell you what, the safest thing to do is to back into a parking spot.”
—The Numbers
—Beeman came with paper. Citing the National Safety Council, he told the commission roughly 20 percent of all vehicle accidents happen in parking garages, and that about 500 people die in them every year. Those are the kinds of figures a city usually cites to justify a rule. Beeman was citing them to explain why the rule is backwards: a driver who backs in pulls out facing forward, with a full windshield of pedestrians in view. A driver who pulls in nose-first leaves blind, backing into a lane, with a rear window and a prayer.
—The Funeral Math
—Then he stopped citing and started remembering.
—Around 2010, he said, a regular at one of his old restaurants, a woman in her 70s, went to church with her husband. After the service they got in the car. “They backed over seven ladies, killed three of them, because she pulled in instead of backing into the spot.” Had she backed in, Beeman said, she would have seen all of them, “after she got done playing with her phone, adjusting her mirror,” and pulled out safely. “The lady I described to you, she died a year later. She was heartbroken.”
—The second story was his own. “On the personal side, I lost a nephew to the very same thing,” Beeman said. The boy was backed over by his own father. Both parents, Beeman’s brother-in-law and sister-in-law, are gone now, and he told the commission plainly that the loss of their son is what killed them.
“You got to rethink what you’re doing here.”
“You Can Read the Plates”
—Beeman anticipated the city’s defense before anyone offered it. Garages that require nose-in parking usually do so because Florida cars carry only a rear plate and enforcement cameras want a clear look at it. His answer was that Sarasota’s garages already know exactly who you are. “We have all the telemetry that you can read the plates when they go in and out.”
—If the gate reads your plate on the way in and on the way out, he argued, the direction your bumper faces in space 214 is not a safety policy. It is a revenue policy with a safety label on it. “I don’t think 50 bucks is worth putting money above safety.”
—The L-Word
—He saved the sharpest line for the lawyers on the dais, and made sure the court reporter got it.
“For those of you who are lawyers, I ask you to consider the severity of this now that you all have been presented with these exact facts and statistics,” Beeman said. “Knowing the danger, should someone back over somebody in a city-controlled parking garage, there may be liability for us as a city, because we’ve changed it so it is mandated that you can’t back in and safely pull out.”
—Translation: you have now been told, and there is a transcript.
“Thanks for your time,” he said. “Thank you,” said the vice mayor. Citizens’ input allows no response from the dais, and none came.
—Three Hours Later
—The item surfaced again at 12:10 p.m., in the round of commissioner remarks, when Commissioner Jen Ahearn-Koch asked staff to bring back information on “the back-in parking item that was brought up to us by Mr. Beeman,” bundling it with Henry Kahwaty’s request for a home-elevation zoning amendment. City Manager Karie Friling followed with a reminder that the city’s parking open house is Monday, Aug. 24, at 5:30 p.m. in the commission chambers, where the parking and planning staff will be “engaging with our businesses and the public.”
—Beeman, a fixture at the podium through this summer’s parking revolt, presumably knows the way.
—What Nobody Explained
—No one from the city said Monday why the back-in rule was reversed, what safety analysis produced the $50 figure, or how many citations have been written under it. Those questions now sit with staff, alongside the extended hours the commission suspended on Aug. 3 and the fine increases that survived that vote 3-2.
—Strip away the statistics and Beeman’s argument is the one downtown merchants have been making since June: the city keeps labeling things safety, or mobility, or management, and the bill keeps arriving at the same doors. The difference Monday was that the man delivering it had already paid, in a currency the parking division does not accept.
