Small Business And The Curb Tax

A lyric from an old Blues song goes, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” There’s a similar disconnect when it comes to the relationship of government to small business. Every government says it wants to help this critically important sector of the U.S. economy. But in countless ways, year by year, most governments continue to make it more difficult for such enterprises to operate profitably.

A government supported stock market bubble that has been inflating since March has done wonders for the bottom lines of large, publicly traded companies, but done virtually nothing for “the little guys.” The huge bailout of huge banks and investment banks that began last year has yet to trickle down to more lending for small companies that need lending bailouts. President Obama’s recently announced plans to help this country’s small businesses focuses on the Small Business Administration (SBA). It may do some good down the road but don’t try holding your breath until it does.

While helping little, Washington, state governments, and town and city governments are leaning harder on small businesses than ever before. Perhaps the hardest leaning these days comes at the town and city level. And in many U.S. towns and cities its more aggressive, frequently outright predatory parking metering and ticketing policies that are hurting the most — coming down especially hard on downtown merchants selling everything from toothpaste to fine art.

Reasonable parking enforcement in downtowns has not always been viewed as a bottom line killer by merchants in these areas. In fact, they once used to welcome it. The reason was that parking spaces there are generally limited, and when no one got tickets or had to pay reasonable meter fees, some drivers hogged these spaces, leaving none for merchants’ own employees much less their customers.

As revenue shortfalls have hit town and city governments hard, however, they have looked to parking to help fill the gaps in their budgets. Anyone who reads a local newspaper in practically any part of the country knows this. Few elements of society, however, have felt it more than “mom and pop” stores in downtowns.

From Center City Philadelphia to San Pedro, a section of Los Angeles, the cries of pain are rising louder by the day. How can strapped employees of these enterprises survive when just parking near their places of work has gotten so meter and ticket costly? How can needed deliveries by made (and paid for) when there’s now a substantial curb tax on such activities? And why should anyone come to shop in these places and get hit with pricey parking tickets when they can go to a mall and park for free? This latter is a question that becomes even more critical around the upcoming holiday shopping season.

Neighborhood merchants associations are in the forefront of the fight to keep local government parking policies from driving local merchants out of business. They are demanding that if ticketing must be so predatory, could some of the proceeds of this ticketing at least go toward area improvements instead of into general revenue funds or the black holes of local parking authorities. Alas, national organizations have not added their own considerable political heft to this battle. In England, the AA (their equivalent of our own AAA) has come out against certain kinds of parking abuse. Our AAA hasn’t. Neither has the national CofC, nor, as far as I can find, any national merchants group.

Free parking is the prime reason malls have grown so mightily over the years. Predatory parking enforcement in the downtowns might prove the death knell for a great many small merchants there unless it’s checked. Parking tickets are no small things for these enterprises. It’s really about time this economic threat is recognized — and acted upon.