Parking Commissioner Raps Fellow Member Over Blog Post on Meters

An online debate over parking meters spilled over into Tuesday’s meeting of the La Mesa Community Parking Commission when member Lynn McRea criticized fellow commissioner Laura Lothian, but not by name.

McRea, whose appointive term ends June 30, rapped Lothian for a “significant lack of respect for the commission, the commissioners who serve on it and the process by which we evaluate as a group [the] various matters before it.”

The rebuke apparently was triggered by Lothian’s blog post for La Mesa Patch titled “The Petty Politics of the Parking Commissioners.”

In the post dated May 21, Lothian raised the question of why parking meters were in front of a business in the 8500 block of La Mesa Boulevard “but nowhere else for blocks.” (See the post here.)

“This block is far outside the Village,” Lothian wrote. “This business owner maintains these meters are an unfair burden to his business and to his patrons and that he's paid countless parking tickets for his customers. He describes being singled out for meters as discriminatory.”

Lothian went on to write that “seeing a legitimate problem, I promised I’d bring it up at May’s parking commission meeting for placement on June’s agenda.”

But Lothian asserted that when she made a motion to put a discussion of these five meters on June’s agenda, she “was promptly squelched by the three parking commissioners present: Jim Wieboldt, Lynn McCrea (sic) and Gina Franklin. This issue died on the spot.”

Tuesday night, at their first session since the Lothian blog was posted, McRea responded within minutes of the meeting’s start in City Council chambers.

Although McRea, a local accountant, mentioned the date of the “article,” she didn’t name where the piece appeared or who wrote it. 

Barely looking toward Lothian, she said of the May 21 post: “I found the article was really self-serving and wasn’t factual, and it shows a significant lack of respect.”

After her 30-second statement, commission chairman Jim Wieboldt invited other comments.

 “Anybody else?” he asked.

Nobody spoke, and Wieboldt immediately moved on to old business.

Lothian’s 364-word blog post was followed by 26 comments (as of June 22) by seven readers—four using their real names and three using pseudonyms.

One of them, Zack, called himself “this hapless Commissioner” in a May 28 comment:

Did Mrs. Lothian ... ever do any research to find out how those meters got there in the first place? I doubt it. If she did, none of it was included in her one-page “parking study” that is prepared with all the thoroughness and expertise of a 6-year-old’s last-minute homework assignment scribbled with a pencil with a point almost as dull as Lothian’s political or civic acumen.

Zack argued that the meters mentioned by Lothian are there “because the businesses in operation at the time of their installation asked for them.”

Zack said employees from nearby offices and other businesses were parking in front of these stores all day and causing “adverse impacts on the business operations. They asked for them. Someone please tell Mrs. Lothian.”

If situations have changed, Zack wrote, “then the business owners themselves should come to the Parking Commission and testify to the issue. Have those business owners made one call to city staff, written one letter, or ever gotten off their backsides long enough to come to the Commission?”

The parking meter debate takes place amid a backdrop of city politics, including  the looming 2012 council elections.

Parking Commission chairman Wieboldt is an announced candidate for City Council, and Lothian said a week after her November 2010 mayoral loss to Art Madrid: “I intend to run for council in 2012 but will not make a formal decision until much, much closer to the summer of 2012.”

McRea also serves as chairwoman of the downtown committee looking into formation of a property-based business improvement district, or PBID, a panel that includes Wieboldt.

All five members of the Parking Commission attended Tuesday's meeting—including Sherry Gillespie. With three city staffers on the dais, the eight officials up front Tuesday outnumbered the seven people in the audience.

As described in the city’s Municipal Code,  the Parking Commision is “committed to ensuring cost effective public parking which meets the needs of the city’s businesses, residents, and patrons by involving the community in parking management decisions.”