Parking agency responds

WHILE the Daily News is entitled to its editorial opinion of the Philadelphia Parking Authority, it's not entitled to create its own version of reality. In a series of articles written back in 2007, the Daily News got it wrong, and got it wrong again in your May 7 editorial ("Time's Up on PPA Meter").

In the nine years since the current board took over, the PPA has given an average of $24 million a year to the city of Philadelphia from our on-street parking operation - $28 million if you include last year's payment to city schools. We also give the city's Aviation Department another $30 million from our airport parking operation. That's more than $50 million a year just from these two parking operations alone.

The Daily News got it wrong when it wrote "the PPA generates $192 million from the city's drivers, and returns less than $1 million to the city's general fund."

Besides the more than $50 million from our on-street and airport parking operations, the PPA gave another $1.4 million in 2009 from lease payments at our Center City garages. We also collected and gave another $17 million to the city in parking taxes. We sent $3.8 million to the state Department of Transportation's highway safety fund that resulted from our red-light camera operation.

So, during fiscal year 2009, the Parking Authority contributed nearly $90 million to the city, state or federal government - out of $210 million in gross revenue.

Parking management in any city is a highly labor-intensive business. With our more than 700 employees, the Inquirer, as well as the city controller's office, attributed the increased number of employees to new responsibilities assigned to the PPA by the city and the state legislature.

The new responsibilities included the Live Stop program, which has removed more than 240,000 illegal vehicles from city streets that are unregistered, uninsured or operated by unlicensed drivers.

We also now enforce parking restrictions around local schools and along walking corridors to improve safety for school students. Residents in every neighborhood have petitioned to have more than 200 additional permit-parking blocks posted in the last five years requiring additional enforcement staff.