Parking new cash cow Author: Jeff Corbett Date: 30/10/2006 Publication: Newcastle Herald
PLANNING a quick trip into Newcastle? Maybe you're seeing a lawyer, ducking into one of Hunter Street's specialty shops, or visiting this newspaper.
More hand-rubbing and sniggering at Newcastle City Council. You are grist for the mill and very welcome grist as the council's parking officers work hard to lift their record fines revenue even higher.
Newcastle council is not fine happy. It is fine ecstatic, with figures tabled at a council meeting last week disclosing that the council raised 3.6 per cent of its annual income, $5.2 million, by booking as many people as it could catch in breach of a rule, parking or otherwise.
Newcastle council has latched onto fines as a fat new revenue source beyond the rate-ceiling restrictions of the State Government. And the fattest source of fines revenue is parking.
Gotcha! $77. You're welcome in Newcastle's CBD. Please come again.
Newcastle council hits parkers harder than any other NSW council outside Sydney. Novocastrians and visitors to Newcastle paid $2,007,000 in parking fines to the council in the 2005/06 financial year, almost double the amount collected in 2002/03, the first year after NSW councils took over responsibility for the policing of parking.
Right from the outset, in July 2002, the Newcastle parking police who moved from the employment of the NSW Government to the Newcastle council were under pressure to issue more fines. The council had expected to levy about $700,000 a year in fines, an amount I believe to be the Newcastle parking fines total under government control, but under pressure in that first year parking inspectors raised just over $1.1 million, up 36 per cent.
The council realised that people who take the risk of parking on Newcastle streets were as good as money trees and so the pressure for more became unrelenting.
The city's parking coppers are writing at least 130,000 more fines a year than they were when they moved to council control four years ago.
Figures given to me by the council on Friday show that parking fine revenue in the second year jumped 11 per cent to $1,242,473, 44 per cent in the third year to $1,790,080 and 12 per cent in the most recent full financial year to $2,007,000.
When Newcastle council took control of parking fines in 2002 its community development manager, Graham Clarke, told this paper that the council was concerned with traffic management, not with raising revenue!
According to NSW figures obtained by a Sydney newspaper under Freedom of Information Newcastle's King Street is one of the State's most lucrative parking-fine streets, the 19th with 3772 fines in the last financial year. The only other non-Sydney street in the top 25 was Byron Bay's Lawson Street, 23rd with 3465 fines. Newcastle's Hunter Street is just outside the top 25.
It is likely that tourists are the biggest victims of Byron Bay's fines spree while in Newcastle it is more likely to be residents of Newcastle and Lake Macquarie who stay beyond the time limit. Tourists are not likely to be deterred by a parking fine from returning but residents of Newcastle and Lake Macquarie most certainly will be. People of the Lower Hunter have a choice of shopping in a centre that offers fine-free (and free) parking or in Newcastle where on-street parking is risky despite willingness to meet parking requirements.
With even the best intentions time-limited parking is risky. Who hasn't overlooked the time! The chances of being greeted by a fine when you rush back to the car are much greater now in Newcastle than they ever were.
Newcastle council argues whenever it expands the paid-parking area of inner Newcastle that it needs to ensure brisk turnover of parking spaces, and it gave that very argument when it introduced weekend paid parking to coincide with the opening the mall markets last year. The markets have gone, fear of weekend parking fines partly to blame, but the weekend paid parking remains.
The better to catch you out, of course. More restrictions, more fines.
jcorbett@theherald.com.au