RISD will pay Providence another $2.75M; gets parking spots
July 19th, 2012 at 11:36 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes
By Ted Nesi
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – The Rhode Island School of Design has agreed to more than double its voluntary payments to the city in exchange for a semi-exclusive right to parking spaces around its campus, Providence Mayor Angel Taveras announced Thursday.
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Update: Taveras spokesman David Ortiz sends along the following list of parking spaces to which RISD will now get “semi-exclusive access”:
[T]he spots include six parking spaces on Fulton Street where parking is currently prohibited; four parking spaces on Westminster Street where parking is currently prohibited; four parking spaces on Meeting Street; 16 parking spaces on the east side of South Water Street; 20 nonexclusive parking spaces on the west side of South Water Street; four parking spaces on Middle Street; five parking spaces on Washington Street; six parking spaces on Benefit Street between Waterman and Meeting Streets; and five exclusive parking spaces on Benefit Street between College Hill and Waterman Street (the Benefit Street spots are mid-block to preserve on-street parking to accommodate the Court House and local businesses).
Tags: angel taveras, education, higher education, providence, providence financial crisis, rhode island school of design, RISD
Nesi's Notes covers politics and the economy in and around Rhode Island for WPRI.com. (Twitter: 
$275k a year doesn’t sound like nearly enough to me for this sort of thing. I don’t mind this in principle, but if you are going to rent public space you should pay markets rates, and this sounds low for the area. The city probably should have simply put up parking meters (with, preferably, congestion pricing) if they were willing to go this route anyway.
A part of me wonders if the city could still put up parking meters on those spots anyway. It would be pretty funny, and fully justified.
Mario, I think this agreement is similar to the Brown one where someone with a Brown pass can occupy a spot all day but if that person pulls out of the spot at any time (to go to a meeting or lunch or whatever) then any person driving by can pull into the spot and feed the meter. So the spots aren’t entirely exclusive.
Ah. I don’t think these spots have meters, though, so does this mean that they are installing meters? If so, it would make the math a lot easier to see how much the city is losing, but if that’s the way the agreement is written it would make it a lot tougher to make up the lost revenue. Plus, if none of these spots have meters right now, and I know that at least some don’t, the cost of parking meter installation would be somewhere around 1-2 years worth of the additional revenue the city is receiving, wouldn’t it? So this agreement just doesn’t look like a winner no matter how you look at it.