Suggested revision to Parking Permit Policy

At 12:20, Saturday September 3, there was one open space in Queen City's Boyer Ave parking lot. Ten minutes earlier, the lot was completely full, and within a span of a couple of minutes two cars with parking permits hanging from the rear view mirrors circled the lot and pulled out again to seek parking on the street.

My curiousity getting the better of me, I decided to walk the lot and count the number of cars parked there without QCYC parking permits. There were twenty-eight. That's probably a lot. If we make any progress toward reaching our membership goals, pressure on the parking lot is going to increase in the future.

A great many of the cars without a parking permit had QCYC decals, suggesting that many of those cars belonged to members who had parked more than one vehicle on the lot for Labor Day weekend. Others did not have QCYC decals, so at least some of them may have belonged to non-members invited to go cruising on a member's boat.

Maybe some of the cars in the lot are just "extra" cars belonging to people in the neighborhood. A non-member would have no problem getting on and off the lot during weekdays when the office is open. I'm sure that almost everybody would agree that any cars just dumped in our lot by the neighbors should be towed away, to make room for members.

It would break a long standing tradition at the club if we actually enforced the one-vehicle-per-membership rule in the parking lot. People expect to be able to park two or more cars in the lot and at least "get away" with it, and certainly none of the bridge officers would want to be so hard-nosed that we would ever actually tow away a vehicle belonging to a member.

So, we need a practical way to be able to differentiate between cars belonging to members who simply choose to ignore the rules and cars belonging to non-members who think the QCYC lot  is a decent place to store an unused car. We're not going to tow anybody in the first category, but we ought to tow everybody in the second.

I suggest that we mail out two different parking permits to each membership number in 2012. One of the permits would be the same permit that we have used the last couple of years, with the club burgee, the year, and the membership number. The second permit would not have a burgee, but would have a memberhip number. The second permit would display the letters, ISSTRDATM. When a member brings two cars to park on the lot, the first car would display the regular format parking permit. The second car would display the ISSTRDATM permit. The security committee, or whomever is in charge of towing violators off the lot, could confidently tow away any vehicle that did not have either the regulation QCYC permit, or the ISSTRDATM permit- such vehicles couldn't possibly belong to members.

If anybody ever asks what ISSTRDATM stands for, just say. "I'm so special the rules don't apply to me."  :-)