Cash-Strapped SF Parks And Rec Wants Parking Rate Hike At GG Park Garage

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) -- A $1-per-hour price increase at the Golden Gate Concourse Parking Garage was unanimously approved this week by the Park and Recreation Commission.

The underground parking garage next to the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum has had ongoing financial problems including having to refinance its debt and has even sought a bailout from President Obama's stimulus program.

The increase still needs the San Francisco Board of Supervisors' approval.

Martha Kropf, chair of the Music Concourse Community Partnership that owns the garage, acknowledged the rate hike to $4.50 an hour on weekdays and five dollars an hour on weekends, isn't popular.

KCBS' Barbara Taylor Reports:

"No one's happy about it including me. This is a job that I'd rather not have," she said.

Rec and Parks commissioner David Lee suggested the hike might be penny wise but pound foolish.

"By raising it you may end up pushing cars out onto the streets," he said.

If the rate hike goes through, it would be the second in less than two years and the third since the garage opened in 2005. That's when it was financed in part with the help of late philanthropist Warren Hellman.

According to Kropf, the debt service owed by the facility is $178,000 a month.

In 2008 former chief financial officer Greg Colley was sentenced to over five years in prison for embezzling almost four million dollars from the parking facility.

(Copyright 2012 by CBS San Francisco. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)