Let the signs go: A plea to move forward together

I stood before the city commission last week because I wanted to share how and why I voted on the paid-parking citizen initiative — I think precision matters. I voted for the citizen initiative -but my intent of that vote was narrower than how it was treated. As I read it and as many community leaders assured us, the referendum was about how future paid parking decisions get made - not a directive to rescind the program already in place. Those are two different questions -but it clearly wasn’t seen that way in the city commission chamber last week.

I support paid parking and I was grateful that commissioners were willing to ask visitors and other non-city residents — who fill our streets and strain our infrastructure — to contribute something back. It wasn't a perfect program, but it was an honest attempt to solve a real problem: a small town carrying costs that tourism creates.

My statement didn't change the outcome. The commission voted to rescind the contract anyway, treating the referendum as a mandate to end paid parking altogether. I believe in listening to voters. That said, I felt helpless and disappointed to have supported something at the ballot box and then watch it get used for a purpose I didn't intend.

I'll be honest about what these past months were like for me — and maybe other like-minded folks. I used to drive downtown and see parked cars as revenue we didn't have to raise from ourselves. Now I mostly remember the ugliness. Businesses were boycotted. Commissioners were targeted, not just on policy but personally. Storefronts posted anti-parking signs -spilling grievances over to tourists who likely have paid parking in their own communities. Neighbors stopped being neighbors over roughly two dollars an hour. For a debate about protecting our small-town character, an awful lot of people spent it treating each other like enemies.

So when I hear some of the same voices now saying "let's reunite the city" and "let's hug it out," I believe some of them mean it. But I won't pretend it doesn't sting a little to hear reconciliation offered so easily by people who seemed to enjoy the fight more than the cause. And the calls to purchase or obtain the old paid-parking signs as some kind of memorial or trophy strike me the same way. For those of us who supported the program, those signs won't be a monument to democracy in action. They'll be a reminder of how bitter and personal this got, and of how, more than once, I found myself disappointed in people I otherwise respect. I'd rather see the signs recycled as scrap metal than turned into a souvenir of a fight nobody should be proud of.

I don’t believe this is the fault of our commissioners who favored paid parking, and I want to say plainly: thank you. Thank you for supporting paid parking when it was politically and personally costly to do so, and thank you for trying to read the will of the voters as honestly as you could last week, even if I don't agree with where that reading landed. Governing a town that depends on tourism, without a bottomless budget, is not an easy job, and I don't think the people doing it deserve the contempt they got. Rescinding the program doesn't rescind the bills. The waterfront project, the infrastructure needs, the costs tourism leaves behind — those are all still sitting on our table, and now without the roughly $1.5 million a year that was going to help cover them. That's the conversation I hope we have next, and I hope we have it as a town and as neighbors, not as adversaries keeping score and/or wielding axes to grind.

I don't expect everyone who fought against paid parking to see it my way, and I'm not asking them to. I'm asking for something smaller: let the signs go. Not as a concession that one side was right and the other wrong, but as a shared decision that we're done using this fight as a trophy or a scar. Whatever comes next — a special tax, a higher millage rate, reduction of services or programs, or some other idea none of us has thought of yet — we're going to need to get there together. That's harder to do with a monument to our worst months displayed on porches and in bars.

My disappointment is fading, slowly (bourbon helps). I'm getting to a place where I can be proud of a town willing to be moved passionately into action. I hope to keep moving in that direction, and to be proud of how we act now that it's over. Maybe we can start by leaving those signs where they belong — in the past.

Barb Zoodsma
Fernandina Beach