WOW

Stash away those quarters. Switch off the alarm clock.

A New York City tradition of free metered parking on Sundays - revoked in many neighborhoods to help ease the city's fiscal crisis three years ago - will be revived under a law that the City Council approved yesterday over a mayoral veto.

Beginning on Nov. 13, about 32,100 parking spaces at the curb and 4,500 in municipal lots will be available to drivers without charge every Sunday. Worshipers had complained that they had had to dash out of services to feed parking meters.

The Council voted overwhelmingly, 42 to 2, to override an August veto by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. The law is expected to cost the city $12 million a year in lost revenue from quarters and parking tickets, in addition to about $1.2 million to change 13,600 parking signs, city officials said.

In a separate vote, the Council overrode another mayoral veto, passing a law that requires larger groceries and stores with food departments to provide a set level of health care benefits to their workers. It has been called an anti-Wal-Mart measure, based on criticism that Wal-Mart's employee health benefits are inadequate. Bloomberg administration officials said the Council overstepped its authority because federal law prohibits municipalities from regulating the terms of employee health care plans.

Mr. Bloomberg and city transportation officials also opposed the parking law, saying that stores would lose business because Sunday drivers would monopolize parking and tie up traffic in already congested neighborhoods.

The mayor even suggested that the law would lead stores to lay off workers, and in his weekly radio program he urged listeners to call their Council representatives and say, 'You cost me my job.' "

In an election year, the issue has provided political fodder. Fernando Ferrer, the Democratic nominee for mayor, accused Mr. Bloomberg of requiring that New Yorkers "pay to pray" - tweaking "pay to play," one of the mayor's campaign themes, which suggests that other candidates are beholden to their campaign donors.

Yesterday, Mr. Ferrer joined the Council speaker, Gifford Miller, whose own mayoral bid ended in the Democratic primary last month, at City Hall to accuse Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire, of once again being out of touch with ordinary New Yorkers.

"There shouldn't be a tax on worship, and that's what this is," Mr. Ferrer said. "We've passed the fiscal crisis. It is appropriate that this measure be ended."

Mr. Miller said that free Sunday parking would not only benefit churchgoers but give some peace of mind to other residents. "New Yorkers are getting killed with parking ticket after parking ticket," he said.

Mr. Bloomberg, who was at a groundbreaking ceremony for a hospital in Harlem, called the new law misguided and a blatant example of "election-year pandering."

"What is likely to happen is, people will park for 24 hours instead of parking for an hour or two and moving on," he said. "That is the reason for parking meters in a lot of these places. We are never going to have enough parking spaces in this city, unfortunately."

Of the city's 77,200 spaces with parking meters, fewer than half accept money on Sundays. Most of those meters were changed as part of a citywide expansion of parking enforcement in 2002, when the city faced a budget shortfall.

Despite the revenue that the expansion generated, city transportation officials say it was largely motivated by complaints from stores whose customers had no place to park on Sundays.

As for the objections of churchgoers, city officials said they had responded to more than a dozen of those complaints case by case, sometimes converting one-hour parking meters to two hours, or eliminating the Sunday charges altogether.

But some pastors said that worshipers were still inconvenienced. "If you're working six days a week, struggling to park your car, struggling to get to work, even the Bible says on the seventh day you rest," said the Rev. Adolph Roberts of the Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Harlem.

"We need one day of rest," he said.
posted by Webbi