Streets of West Hartford Paved with Gold

To paraphrase a famous line from the cartoon strip Pogo, Town Manager Ron Van Winkle has met a new stream of revenue and it is parking.

According to a published report, the town manager is considering every so gently massaging the ban on overnight parking in West Hartford from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. Currently, people can only park overnight by calling the police department and asking to be put on the exclusion list, which allows them to park overnight on a West Hartford street.

I've used the system a couple of times since living in town and it's relatively painless. I've also forgot to use the system a couple of times but somehow dodged a parking ticket – most likely because I was parked outside my own house or the police had other things to do that night.

Well, according to a story I read, there were 14,000 requests for overnight parking, up from 5,000 in 2010. That means more than 38 times a day somebody calls the police department looking for free overnight parking.

No wonder Van Winkle has dollar signs and parking signs in his eyes. After all, as reported here on , he favors extending parking meter hours until 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday in town (but even parking meters rest on Sundays). He's also proposing that the meters be allowed to collect up to four hours in the evening so restaurant patrons (like State Treasurer Denise Nappier for example?) won't have to run out and feed the meter during dinner. More importantly, one won't have to miss the end of The Hangover II with what I'm sure is a twisting, complicated plot.

Van Winkle is even making meter parking more convenient by eventually installing kiosks like they have in Hartford. There you can swipe your credit card and get all the parking time you need up to two hours. It's a great system that people will grow to love and I wish was in place before I got a parking ticket while visiting the eye doctor and not having a pocket full of quarters.

I have just one request. Make paid overnight parking something you can do online, pay by credit card, and print out a sign for your car window. Of course you'll have to equip cruisers so they can tell if signs are fraudulent, but think of the money in fines that can be raised.

OK, so I have two requests actually. Let's use the money raised from overnight parking to patrol parking at sports fields like Sterling Field. Let's move our traffic wardens around town to start issuing tickets and clean up the non-West Hartford Center/Blue Back Square parking problems, too.

So our town manager is on the right path. He knows the way to keep taxes low is to hit the streets – the streets of gold that is. Overnight free parking is dead. Long live paid overnight parking.