Dublin Core
Title
Sumner Johnson M_5
SUMNER: anyway, on that off-street parking, the city owned some of that property down there, but the rest of it was old, dilapidated buildings that were off of the drag, or main drag, and deteriorated pretty bad. And through parking meter revenues, we were able to dedicate that funds and buy property, the city was, and then tore down the buildings with street department personnel and equipment, and then, contracted to build those off-street parking. And by present day standards, they weren’t as good as we’d like, but back then, they were pretty uptown. And that cleaned up an area, plus provided parking for people. But it really didn’t do the job, [00:01:00] because it was not near enough to the merchants. It was good enough for employee parking and so forth but wasn’t enough to merchants. So, then we conceived a large local improvement district type off-street parking. And I actually wrote the amendment to that old code by Dick Riordan and the city attorney, and he thought it was okay, run it by Hal Ryan, who was a state senator and city attorney for Weiser, run it by Jim McClure, who then was the state senator and the city attorney for Payette, and run by the legal counsel for the Association of Idaho Cities, I can’t remember his name now. All four of them thought it was fine, at least. We gave that to McClure, and he carried it to the legislature and had passed, [00:02:00] and we got it on the books, and we started to create a local improvement district here, and an enlarged district for off street parking, and Earl Reid read it as an attorney representing an opposition, and there was a flaw in it. Just like that, he picked it up. And here, we’d run it by all of the legal minds that we could that knew about city government and state law. And that killed us. But also then, I think we got it amended and then we started it again, and Sevren Honstead violently opposed it, because he had created parking spaces for his property and blah, blah, blah. And so, Frank Bevington was running around, scurrying around in opposition to it. And I remember one night about [00:03:00] eight o’clock at home, I got a call from San Francisco, from Frank Bebbington. He was in a panic. Stanford Variety Store and, what was that other store in there? Drugstore, Nampa Drugstore, had four years left on their lease and they’d given notice that they were moving out. He thought he was in -- Montgomery Ward’s had a number of years left...
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SUMNER: anyway, on that off-street parking, the city owned some of that property down there, but the rest of it was old, dilapidated buildings that were off of the drag, or main drag, and deteriorated pretty bad. And through parking meter revenues, we were able to dedicate that funds and buy property, the city was, and then tore down the buildings with street department personnel and equipment, and then, contracted to build those off-street parking. And by present day standards, they weren’t as good as we’d like, but back then, they were pretty uptown. And that cleaned up an area, plus provided parking for people. But it really didn’t do the job, [00:01:00] because it was not near enough to the merchants. It was good enough for employee parking and so forth but wasn’t enough to merchants. So, then we conceived a large local improvement district type off-street parking. And I actually wrote the amendment to that old code by Dick Riordan and the city attorney, and he thought it was okay, run it by Hal Ryan, who was a state senator and city attorney for Weiser, run it by Jim McClure, who then was the state senator and the city attorney for Payette, and run by the legal counsel for the Association of Idaho Cities, I can’t remember his name now. All four of them thought it was fine, at least. We gave that to McClure, and he carried it to the legislature and had passed, [00:02:00] and we got it on the books, and we started to create a local improvement district here, and an enlarged district for off street parking, and Earl Reid read it as an attorney representing an opposition, and there was a flaw in it. Just like that, he picked it up. And here, we’d run it by all of the legal minds that we could that knew about city government and state law. And that killed us. But also then, I think we got it amended and then we started it again, and Sevren Honstead violently opposed it, because he had created parking spaces for his property and blah, blah, blah. And so, Frank Bevington was running around, scurrying around in opposition to it. And I remember one night about [00:03:00] eight o’clock at home, I got a call from San Francisco, from Frank Bebbington. He was in a panic. Stanford Variety Store and, what was that other store in there? Drugstore, Nampa Drugstore, had four years left on their lease and they’d given notice that they were moving out. He thought he was in -- Montgomery Ward’s had a number of years left...
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