Opinion: What’s the Matter with Providence?

I write this a few minutes after receiving a $25 ticket for overtime parking at a meter in Providence. I walked out of Olga’s Cup and Saucer, where I had paid $5.74 for a tea and croissant plus $2 tip after paying $2.50 for the maximum two hours on the parking meter. I was watching the time carefully and even joked with the counter staff before leaving that I knew essentially to the minute the meter was about to expire. To my surprise, I found a meter reader literally next to my car writing a ticket, and although she denied it, I am convinced she must have stood there waiting for the meter to tick over to expiration. So the croissant was good, the tea was great, and the service was outstanding, but I may never go back to Olga’s.

Why was I there in the first place? Because I was attending the twice-monthly Open Coffee, “an informal gathering of entrepreneurs and startup heroes…” It’s a business networking event for people whose goal is to promote economic activity in Rhode Island generally and Providence specifically, run by the Founder’s League who describe themselves as “Where Rhode Island’s startup community comes together to make great things happen.” Most of the attendees are focused on high technology, often doing new and exciting things with computers and on the web, but some work with more prosaic opportunities, including food production and industrial manufacturing. Billionaires are not at the table, but a substantial portion of new jobs and creativity coming into the city within the next few years could easily be attributed to this startup community.

Several discussions I had at the table touched upon the difficulty of staying in Providence. One person wondered about the status of the Interstate 195 redevelopment “knowledge district” that was thrown into chaotic uncertainty for a year by the now-abandoned plan to relocate the Pawtucket Red Sox onto that land. Another person talked about being unable to find a residential rental space for a community of eight people who wanted to live and work together; I advised him to look in Pawtucket. Two separate discussions involved the unsuitability of the Providence schools, and I was asked where I went to high school (a question I don’t hear often since graduating in the 1970s) and where my father went to high school (he was in the first graduating class at Mount Pleasant in the 1930s).

Still, it didn’t occur to me until getting the parking ticket that one could see a consistent theme here of Providence trying to drive people away.

The city is not just trying to enforce existing parking rules, but has doubled the number of meters since 2010 according to WJAR Channel 10 news who sifted public records of 173,292 citations over three years (2013-2015) to learn that a very few streets account for the vast majority of overtime parking tickets. Point Street, where I was, came in 14^th on the list with 4,294, or 2.48% of the total, and just 14 streets accounted for more than half (52.24%) of the total number of tickets. Of the 100 streets where tickets had been issued, 48 accounted for less than 30 tickets each across the three years analyzed, and 27 of those accounted for less than 5 tickets each.

We’ve covered the parking meter controversy before (“I Parked In Providence. Can You?” by Mike Ryan, June 1, 2016). Business operators and landlords, notably the Dulgarian Brothers who own the Avon Cinema, have vocally protested the actual and proposed introduction of meters to the Thayer Street, Wayland Square, Wickenden Street, and Hope Street business districts, even starting an online petition with (as of my check just now) 4,152 signers: “Patrons who used to come from nearby towns to support our businesses have been left with no choice but to seek entertainment, shopping and dining elsewhere.”

Stephen L. Carter, law professor at Yale University, published a memorable article that begins, “On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce.” He was talking about Eric Garner, a man strangled to death by police in a confrontation over his illegally selling individual cigarettes, known as “loosies,” in violation of New York State tax law. There were a lot of factors that led to the death of Garner, as Carter points out, but there is no escaping that the whole process was set in motion by political decisions of legislators who never expected anyone to die for depriving the government of a few cents in excise tax.

While my personal interaction with law enforcement was far less harmful than Garner’s, there is a common element of reasonable intentions on the part of government gone horribly wrong. I didn’t like paying $2.50 to park on the public street already paid for with tax money, but I can understand why the city wants the money and promotes turnover of available spaces. What I didn’t bargain for was that the $2.50 was only my entry fee into playing a game of “gotcha” with a meter reader.

Clearly the mayor and city council did not expect to-the-minute aggressive enforcement that would actively discourage customers from patronizing local businesses. How many people, whether customers for coffee and croissants or startup entrepreneurs, are being driven away from Providence never to come back?