Now that’s a campaign promise with curb appeal.
Doug McCallum, mayoral candidate for the Safe Surrey Coalition, says that if elected on Oct. 20 his group will eliminate pay parking metres on the streets around Surrey Memorial Hospital and in the underground parking lot at city hall.
“I’ve always believed that’s sort of the people’s house,” McCallum said of city hall. “It’s not council’s, it’s not the mayor’s. It’s the people’s house and why would you ever want to have pay parking if you’re going to your own house sort-of-thing. If you’re going to city hall to get permits or to pay your taxes, you shouldn’t have to do it and so we’re going to offer free parking at city hall.
Surrey mayoral candidate Doug McCallum
“The reason we’re doing this is we’ve just heard tonnes of complaints around the community. They go there and then if they’re longer because the service is so bad and then they come back down and they have a parking ticket, you know, it’s crazy to have to pay parking for the place. We want the city hall to become customer friendly instead of a barrier to that.”
People have also been complaining about having to pay for parking when they visit Surrey Memorial Hospital, he said.
“When you go there you’re under stress or tension because you’re going to visit loved ones or members of your family that is sick and the last thing you need to do is to reach into your pocket and try to find some money to do a parking metre, and it’s even worse than that once you get in, you know, you get in there and if you’re in there a little longer in there than you expected it’s even worse after talking to loved ones then you have to worry about if the parking metres’ run out or whether you get a ticket.
“The company that Surrey uses, I think they just sit around waiting for parking metres to do and then they give you a ticket,” McCallum said. “We don’t need that when people are under so much tension when they go to the hospital so we’re going to take all the parking metres on our city streets off of that around the hospital.”
Asked if that would apply also to the Jim Pattison Outpatient Care and Surgery Centre in Whalley, McCallum replied, “Yep.”
How about the pay parking around the Surrey Food Bank at 10732 City Parkway?
“That doesn’t make any sense, we should look at that,” he said. “Anything like that is absolutely ridiculous — I don’t get the thinking there, you know, at the city hall.”
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