City of San Diego: Fees, Taxes, and False Statements About Balboa Park Parking Revenue

By Paul Krueger

If our elected officials were as creative with cutting expenses as they’ve been picking our pockets, we’d have a balanced budget with little, if any, need for additional revenue.

But our Mayor and City Council won’t make the fiscally responsible decision to cut the city’s workforce — especially its bloated middle-management ranks — through buy-outs, early retirements, furloughs, and lay-offs.

What we get instead is an endless array of new fees and taxes, which place the biggest burden on those least able to absorb these costs.

Doubling parking meter fees, expanding the hours, days, and locations where those fees are imposed, charging for parking in and around Balboa Park, and issuing thousands of $100-plus “daylighting” citations for motorists who unknowingly park within 20 feet of an intersection are just the start.

Every day brings a new and very unwelcome scheme that lightens our pocketbook.

If you don’t carry a bagful of quarters to feed the meters (yes, it takes 10 coins to park for an hour), you’ll now pay an additional credit card “transaction fee” for on-street parking.

Downtown, North Park, and Mid-City residents will be charged $150 to obtain a permit that allows them to avoid paying the new Sunday meter fees near their homes and apartments. This regressive fee most harms those who don’t have a garage or off-street parking, and who still have to pay the $2.50 per hour meter fee in the early evenings and on Saturdays.

And — surprise, surprise — there’s a $5 “account verification fee” to get the necessary permit for reduced-rate parking for city residents in Balboa Park.

Mayor Gloria’s team tries to deflect responsibility for these “revenue enhancement measures” by saying it’s only fair that we “cover merchant processing costs” or assuring us that “account verification fees are vendor-based, not city-imposed.”

But those fees should be factored into the cost of administering these new tax collections, not added to the fee structure.

By the City’s logic, we should also pay a surcharge for the wages paid to the additional employees who issue the parking citations, the paper used to write those citations, the gas consumed by their vehicles, etc., etc.

Worse is the Mayor’s brazen and relentless effort to confuse us about how the Balboa Park parking revenue will be spent, and the unwillingness — or intellectual inability — of the media to challenge his misleading statements.

The Mayor has repeatedly either inferred or outright stated that the parking revenue will be used to make much-needed improvements in the Park’s buildings, bathrooms, and public spaces. The city’s parking portal claims “parking revenues are invested into Balboa Park” and that “revenue funds operations, maintenance and improvements to the park.”

Before Councilmember Marti von Wilpert voted to approve the new parking fees, she specifically asked city staff if that money would provide a specific revenue stream for Balboa Park projects. The answer was an unqualified “yes.” But that response was misleading at best.

As explained in my September 8, 2025, Rag story (aptly titled “My Frustrating Search for a Simple Answer About Paid Parking in Balboa Park”), all that projected revenue will find its way to the city’s general fund and will be used to help eliminate (or at least reduce) the city’s sizable 2026 budget deficit.

The city’s Independent Budget Analyst also confirmed that any additional funding for Balboa Park over and above what’s already budgeted in the general fund will be realized only if parking revenues exceed that general fund amount (which it clearly will not, this year, or in the foreseeable future).

In sum, the cash generated by parking fees is just one more revenue source needed to backfill the budget deficit.  If more cuts to city services and infrastructure are still required to balance the budget, Balboa Park will not be insulated from those cuts.

Short of a ballot measure to repeal the new parking fees or a special election to recall the mayor (and perhaps those council members who approved those fees), there’s nothing we can do to reverse these hugely unpopular fees.

But we can insist on honesty, accuracy, transparency, and accountability, and donate our time and money to candidates who pledge to support those basic tenets of good government.