Government is in the business to provide infrastructure and services to their clients, the residents and taxpayers of the area they serve. It would be in their best interests to make efforts to assure a successful local economy.
We all know there is a 'hate-on' for vehicles being 'stored' on 'public' roads by certain vocal members of society. Well we have a choice, ban all personal vehicles and while we are at it single family homes with unused bedrooms. We all know thats not going to happen no matter how shrill and angry certain groups become.
The reasonable response is to provide adequate off street rotational storage of vehicles for a reasonable fee. Companies such as Robins Parking and Impark etc manage to make a business model out of it, so why not engage and consider a P3 model like the Arena and invite suggestions from the folks that actually do this stuff for a living instead of relying on dogma which just pi$$es people off as they can see right through that crap.
We have loads of space to accommodate 2 or 3 strategically placed multi level parkades. The arena parking lot if triple decked could mean the removal of the parking at the Crystal Pool with only spaces available for handicap spots, remove the long term parking use from Johnson St and Fisgard and free up a few hundred spots for rotational parking. A lot of us have beaten this to death by saying similar versions of this for the past couple of months, surely to goodness if we can come up with this type of discussion our 'elected officials' could as well.
If they cant I dont believe its because they havent given it similar thought I think its because it would be contrary to their ideology which will only be harmful to the people they are supposed to be serving.