Current meter rules. Photo by Adam Green.

Back in November, Councilmember Jim Graham suggested raising parking meter rates to restore some cuts in important housing programs like HPAP, which helps people get mortgages to buy homes. Graham suggested raising $1/hour meters to $2, and 50¢ meters to 75¢. He also proposed ending DC’s policy of free parking on Saturdays.

The Council passed his bill in December, but first, they stripped out the Saturday portion. Councilmember David Catania introduced the amendment, and Carol Schwartz, in one of her last acts as Councilmember, valiantly argued for keeping parking free. Making it free, in fact, was Schwartz’s achievement in 1997. Of course, in the 12 years since, downtown has gotten extremely popular, and parking is full on Saturdays. Keeping the parking free doesn’t encourage people to go downtown; it just makes it even harder to park and deprives the city of revenue.

As it turns out, DC never restored any of the housing program cuts, because just after the Council passed the meter rate hike, new budget estimates came out that were even worse than before. Mayor Fenty and his staff recently released their 2010 budget to deal with these shortfalls. The transportation chapter takes the sensible step of ending this Saturday moratorium. That will net the city $4.5 million more for DDOT operations.

The budget also reshuffles money around, including the money from December’s rate hike. For the hearing, I wrote that while spending meter money on needed programs was good for the short term, long-term we need to keep meter revenue dedicated to transportation. Charging for parking is a good idea, but to keep it from hurting shoppers and businesses, we need to also spend money from parking on improvements, like the Circulator or streetcars, that help people get to those commercial corridors by other means.

The new 2010 budget allocates the meter revenue to DDOT, but still produces $12 million for the general fund through some budgetary musical chairs. It moves $12 million from meters hike to a streetlight maintenance fund. Then, it takes $12 million of DDOT’s budget out of the streetlight fund and allocates it to DC’s Metro contribution. Finally, the general fund contributes $12 million less to Metro. In the end, instead of $12 million of meter revenue going into the general fund, all meter revenue goes to transportation, and the general fund still has $12 million.

The Council wants this general fund money to go toward critical affordable housing programs. In the budget, the Housing Finance Agency grows from the 2009 budget (which had cut the housing programs) by only $975,000. However, the agency section of the budget doesn’t specify where that money will go. The housing program funding also could appear elsewhere. I’ve emailed people in that area of the Council to find out. They’ll be spending much more time poring over this budget.