By SDCN Staff
San Diego, CA–Following approval by the San Diego City Council on October 27, the City of San Diego will invest nearly two million dollars of parking meter revenue to make needed infrastructure repairs in communities where the funds were collected.
The action to pause the city’s Community Parking District program comes as the city seeks to improve and modernize its parking management policies. In June, the city council approved a comprehensive package of parking reforms and, as part of those reforms, implemented changes to the parking program to improve efficiency and transparency.
“There’s no shortage of work that needs to get done in these parking districts, and we can maximize the impact of this meter revenue by using city crews to make repairs that San Diegans are asking for,” said Bethany Bezak, Director of the city’s Transportation Department. “Streetlights are a perfect example. There are over 1,200 outages in downtown right now that have been requested by residents and businesses, and this council action will unlock the resources we need to eliminate that backlog.”
Since the late 1990s, the city has worked with nonprofit community organizations to manage the CPD program. Under Council Policy 100-18, CPDs were established to help provide parking management solutions for areas impacted by high parking demand; there were active CPDs in four neighborhoods: Downtown, Uptown, Mid-City, and Pacific Beach.
An internal review by the city’s transportation department this year identified ongoing issues with how funds have been managed and documented. In fiscal year 2025, the share of revenues available for CPD organizations was $3.3 million, but CPDs were able to expend only about 30% of these funds. With a growing backlog of maintenance and infrastructure needs, the city can make effective use of these revenues immediately to benefit parking-impacted communities.
With the council approval, the transportation department will now use the $1.8 million originally budgeted for CPDs in the current fiscal year (FY26) to implement streetlight repairs, sidewalk fixes, and safety improvements in those parking districts.
Starting this week, city crews will begin making these repairs in parking district neighborhoods and will address infrastructure projects in other areas in the coming weeks. To start, there are currently 1,200 streetlight outages in downtown, and a portion of the funds will be used to significantly reduce that backlog.
To make requests for infrastructure repairs, both inside and outside of parking district areas, residents are encouraged to use Get it Done.
