Free Parking: It’s not just a Monopoly square

Politics can be a messy and sometimes depressing arena, so Spin Control likes to pass along good news whenever possible. Here’s the best we’ve had for a while:

Parking is free in Spokane on Monday. You don’t have to plug meters.

It’s one of the rare days when a parking meter holiday is not also a major holiday like Thanksgiving or Christmas, so more people have more reasons to be downtown other than being the one poor schlump who had to come into the office to answer the phones or monitor the computers.

That’s because Monday is Columbus Day, which is possibly the least celebrated holiday in the pantheon of days for which which the parking meters don’t grab money. (The full list is inside the blog.)

Columbus Day used to be a really big deal, and school kids all over the country were taught “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Apparently when he got to the new world, he was able to park the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria for free, so Spokane continues that tradition for drivers.

Columbus Day ain’t what it used to be, however. In fact the Seattle City Council recently disavowed Columbus Day and instead will be celebrating “Indigenous Peoples Day”.

But Seattle didn’t have free parking on Columbus Day, so they don’t have to worry about making the change there. Perhaps next year they can offer free parking to Indigenous Peoples, thus making up for the fact that the folks who followed Columbus took their land, killed many of them with wars or diseases, and made most of the rest to go live far away in places that the new residents didn’t want.

It’s  not much. But it’s a start. I mean, do you know how expensive parking is in Seattle these days? It makes parking at River Park Square seem cheap by comparison.

Spokane’s parking meter holidays are:

New Years Day
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birthday
President’s Day
Memorial Day
Independence Day (Fourth of July)
Labor Day
Columbus Day
Veteran’s Day
Thanksgiving Day
Christmas Day