One of the first news stories I wrote, nearly 50 years ago, reported on a conflict between downtown merchants who wanted metered parking to be free, and council members who did not want to increase other taxes to cover the loss of money during the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas season.

Last week, the St. Marys City Council “kind of” passed an ordinance to allow free parking during that time frame. The council decided to allow free parking in lots but to keep the requirement for paying to park in metered spaces along city streets.

I don’t have a problem if a town council chooses to allow free on street parking during the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas season.

I think the idea is naive because I have never in my life decided whether to shop in this or that particular place on the basis of whether the parking is free, but I have decided on the basis of whether a parking space is available.

If a parking space is metered, I pay the fee from a small hoard of change I keep within my vehicles. If I am out of change, I “play the odds,” and park there anyway. Most of the time, I do not get a parking ticket. If I get one every three months or so, I pay it, on the same theory that I know it costs me $12 a week to play one Pennsylvania Lottery game of my choosing every day. You want to play, you have to pay.

But I get yell-out-loud angry if a town council chooses to make ordinarily metered parking free, but then does not provide for enforcement of the time limits for using those metered spaces.

St. Marys council member Gary Anderson claims that in past years during periods of free parking, he has never been able to pull into the parking meters beside the Post Office, marked in red to denote their 15-minute status, because the free parking opened them up for people to park all day.

Anderson hit the nail on the head.

The primary reason for having parking meters has little to do with bringing money into the town treasury. No, metered parking is designed to frustrate meter hogs, those people who park all day long, or for most of a day, in spaces where high turnover is desirable or even necessary.

Red-topped meters beside the post office in St. Marys delineate one such group of necessary-to-limit spaces. Their 15-minute limits allow patrons to cart large packages into or out of the post office, while forcing those people to move elsewhere if they intend to shop, eat, visit, work or lollygag in the downtown area.

Hooray.

I like to be able to park close to where I need to go.

People who attempt to evade paying their fair share for metered parking are, in my opinion, freeloaders, “I’m entitled” people who think they deserve special treatment because, well, because they are special people – they think.

News Flash: They aren’t special. We are all just people. There is no free lunch.

The need to limit parking times in certain areas is a matter of the common good. Downtown areas and other high-traffic areas need vehicle turnover if most of us are to have reasonable opportunity to park close to where we are going.

So if St. Marys, or any other town, chooses to waive the meter fees, that town should still enforce the time limits.

How?

Hire an enforcer, a meter attendant. Or delegate the job to police.

It is simple enough to walk the streets and chalk-mark vehicle tires, or use other ways of determining how long a particular vehicle has occupied a specific parking space.

Heck, in this digital age, it should be easy enough to use a smartphone or a digital camera equipped with time-and-date stamps to capture a line of vehicles, then review those vehicles during a next-hour (or whatever interval is legal) trip.

Stay too long? Save the photo and write the ticket.

“But people have come to expect” free parking during the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas season, said Ann Pistner Gabler of the Chamber of Commerce, quoted in a recent news story.

Yep. Sure. Good luck with that.

We “expect” Santa Claus to give us free goodies, too.

Go stand on your roof from sunset on Christmas Eve until dawn on Christmas Day, and take that matter up with Santa.

We don’t always get what we expect.

Ho, ho, ho.

ı ı ı

Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net.