The People Have Spoken, and Parking Goes Back the Way It Was : Santa Monica: The council decides that motorists will no longer have to feed meters until midnight.

Wiping the egg off its collective face, the Santa Monica City Council has quietly rolled back the extended metered street-parking hours it put into effect just five weeks ago.

“I said: ‘Hey guys, we should say ‘Uncle’ here. We really blew this one,’ ” said Councilwoman Christine Reed, who sponsored the move to scrap the new policy of enforcing metered parking on downtown streets until midnight.

“People were angry,” Reed said. “They were swearing they would never come back to this city. Our own citizens were phenomenally upset . . . because what we did was such a dumb idea.”

And so at last week’s council meeting, after acknowledging a deluge of complaints from merchants, residents and motorists, the council voted to further study its newly initiated policy.

Then, after going into executive session and after nearly everyone in the audience had gone home, the members voted again--this time 4 to 1--to scrap the policy, at least for the time being.

As fast as humanly possible, the adhesive labels advising of the extended hours will be scraped off or replaced with new labels restoring the previous 6 p.m. deadline. After 6 p.m., parking in those spots will again be free.

In all, about 2,500 meters are affected, on streets in the downtown shopping area, on Main Street north of Ocean Park Boulevard, and on Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards from Lincoln Boulevard east to the city limit, said City Parking and Traffic Engineer Ron Fuchiwaki.

Unaffected by the council’s retreat, however, will be the six downtown city parking structures, where 3,000 metered spaces were also extended from 6 p.m. to midnight last month. And enforcement of metered parking on Main Street south of Ocean Park, which already had lasted until midnight, will not change, Fuchiwaki said. Fuchiwaki said police and parking officers have been instructed not to ticket people in affected areas during the evening. And he said city officials are hoping they will be able to peel off the stickers stuck on meters to display the new hours, so the old hours can be seen. But because the stickers have such strong adhesive, he said, new stickers will probably be necessary.

“We will be making our best efforts to change the signs that we just changed, but it may take some time,” Fuchiwaki said.

The underlying problem is that many of the meters in question have limits ranging from 36 minutes to an hour--fine for daytime shoppers, but far too restrictive for the diners and movie-goers who flock to the Third Street Promenade area at night.

The changes may not be permanent. The council hopes to engineer some kind of compromise to keep metered parking at night, but in such a way that doesn’t discourage nighttime visitors.

Fuchiwaki said he expected the new, more permanent recommendations requested by the council to be completed in about one month.

The change was approved by the council in May, but it wasn’t until city employees started putting the new stickers on the meters in mid-August that merchants, their customers and residents started raising a stink.

One merchant, Tony Minero, was so outraged with the new policy that he collected more than 1,100 signatures in less than five days.

“I’m sure I could have stood on a corner and gotten millions of signatures, because nobody liked it,” said Minero, owner of the 2nd Street Bar & Grill.

Minero said the new policy hurt business in the few weeks it was in effect. “It was a mistake,” he said. “They realized after a lot of noise from customers and merchants.”

Thomas H. Carroll, executive director of the Bayside District Corp., which operates the Third Street Promenade, also hailed the council’s decision to back off the new policy.

“We think four hours (of parking) is what is needed at night,” Carroll said.

The policy was expected to bring the city $350,000 a year in additional revenue, some of that possibly to build more parking lots.

City officials had defended the extended enforcement hours, saying the change was instituted not only to raise money but to help alleviate the parking crush. By making it more expensive to park, Fuchiwaki and other officials said, people would turn over the spaces more often, and maybe even walk instead of drive.

Fuchiwaki agreed this week, however, that forcing people to keep feeding one-hour meters at night was bad for business.