A Vancouver School Board trustee introduced a motion at Tuesday’s board meeting that would see trustees charged for parking in response to a recent proposal to charge teachers for parking during school hours.
Vision Vancouver trustee Joy Alexander put forward the notice of motion to charge trustees for parking on school board property. The motion will be debated at the next meeting on June 14.
Alexander said she has not heard anything from trustees about the motion so far, but expects it will be passed.
“We shouldn’t get freebies just because we are trustees,” Alexander said to the Courier after the meeting.
Vision Vancouver trustee Mike Lombardi also put forward a notice of motion to repeal pay parking, citing his experiences talking to teachers and administrators at the schools for which he is a board liaison.
“I’ve had a chance to visit nine of my liaison schools over the last couple of weeks, and I’ve heard some pretty clear messages from those schools,” Lombardi said.
Lombardi proposed compensating for the lost revenue by adding 25 more International Education students.
“I also heard about the fact that this would make us the only school district in B.C. and perhaps in Canada with pay parking, which is not something exactly that we want to be known for,” he said. “It would become a highly symbolic decision and be a daily irritant for many of our employees.”
The motion will be voted on at the board meeting June 29.
The board also collected questions from the audience, which were read for the record but will not be answered until the next meeting. One of the questions was, “What will it take for the board to repeal this motion?”
A VSB memo released May 15 said staff would be charged $15 per month for non-assigned parking, and $35 for an assigned spot. The motion was approved in September 2014, but has yet to be implemented.
Questions from the planning and facilities meeting on May 20 were answered in three-page document handed out at the meeting. It outlines business hours as “6 a.m. – 4 p.m., Monday to Friday.”
It also states that teachers working after hours for extra curricular activities would not be required to pay for metered parking outside of business hours, since “most school parking lots have little to no demand after 4 p.m.”
The board estimates that it costs about $400,000 to maintain the parking lots every year, with snow removal, salting, and line repainting factoring into these costs.
The board estimates that parking will have net revenue of about $225,000, which would help offset maintenance costs.
@KathleenSaylors
