Free street parking downtown on Saturdays will soon be a thing of the past, and not everyone is happy about it.
The move by the city’s budget committee comes as council tries to avoid an 11 per cent property tax hike.
Jennifer’s of Nova Scotia is a well-known local gift shop located on busy Spring Garden Road in the heart of downtown Halifax, and the owner, Kurt Bulger, says he’s worried the city’s new parking changes could keep customers away. Staff have access to a lot, but customer’s have to fend for themselves. He says right now, they’re parking “wherever they can, however they can, and it’s getting expensive and hard to find.”
With daily rates also going up by 25%, Bulger hopes the changes won’t deter people from visiting the shop once tourist season kicks off.
Meanwhile, Dalhousie student Maria Jreige relies on street parking every day and says the new fees will hit students especially hard.
“I just don’t think it’s very fair. We pay for street parking five days out of the week, we should at least get the weekends off to pay. And it just makes it more expensive, and more difficult for us to go around and have a good time on the weekends,” she told Acadia News on Friday.
Jreige says adding Saturdays and raising prices feels like too much.
“To increase it by that much is crazy because if you’re going to especially add Saturdays, like jacking up the prices is like, unnecessary,” she says, calling the city’s plan “absolutely absurd.”
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