IT seems like everyone has an opinion on the sweeping 75 per cent increase in on-street parking in Hamilton recently announced by Hamilton Mayor Sutherland Madeiros, including some of the candidates for Common Councillor for the Corporation of Hamilton. Polls open Monday.

With the unexpected hike in parking fees likely to feature as a major issue in the election, the Mid-Ocean News shares some of the candidates' views on the contentious matter with you:

Glen Smith

As a nominee for one of the three common councillor spots, I wasn't privy to the decision to raise the parking fee, however, in my personal opinion the increase is very steep. I can understand increases in general but given the economies of scale, the rising gas prices and the like, it will make it harder on the average man on the street who will feel the effect of the increase. We're trying to encourage Bermudians to come to Hamilton to shop and this might affect that effort. It also could effect the average pensioner who comes to town to do their errands who might not be able to park in a car park like Bulls Head and walk the distance into town. Perhaps there should be a shuttle service between car parks and a central point in Hamilton.

I think perhaps a better way might have been to try and educate the public on the benefits of parking in a car park. For instance, I have been in the City of Hamilton for some time and I didn't realise that parking was free in Bulls Head on Saturdays. Some kind of communication initiative would have been helpful.

Graeme Outerbridge

I was privy to the discussions surrounding the parking increase and while there was some resistance around the table to the amount of increase, the majority supported it. Parking is one of the revenue streams for the Corporation to help defray costs from staffing and capital demands.

I believe how it rolled out could have been handled better and could have been explained better but the Mayor did try to explain that parking in Hamilton, even with the increase, is still one of the cheapest on-the-street parking in the world. You can't obviously equate Hamilton to larger cities like Boston but if you look at the per square mile concentration of cars to cities in the rest of the world, it is (parking cost) way below that of other cities.

Hopefully it will encourage people to make more use of the city's car parks. The Corporation is looking to develop a comprehensive parking plan for the city and are already looking at developing car parks on Elliot Street and one near Reid Street extension. A lot of people don't realise that the #6 Shed, opposite the Cabinet Building, has been brought back into the public domain for public parking use. We are investigating ways to create more parking on Front Street and having more user-friendly (pay and display) machines that use debit cards instead of people having to carry a load of dollar coins in their pockets.

Everyone is conscious of rising gas prices and how the recession of the US affects us all and not everyone is going to be happy. It's the cost of doing business in Hamilton.

Charles Gosling

In a business sense, I think it wasn't a great idea to increase it by such a large amount all at one time. It would have been better to do it in increments over time. I'm not sure if this large increase was forced upon them by influences (they could not control) but it would have been better to do it in increments. Perhaps increase by 25 cents at a time. While the Corporation hasn't set a firm date, they have given the consumer enough time, if they so wish, to take advantage of the notice.

Diane Gordon

For me, this is a larger issue. We have a major congestion problem in the City of Hamilton. Transportation is a huge issue and must be addressed. While I can't speak for the Mayor, I believe his reasoning behind the increase is to encourage people to utilise the public car parks. Have you ever been to the car parks in the morning rush hour before work? They are choc-a-block. There is not enough capacity for people to park their cars. If you are trying to eliminate people from bringing cars into Hamilton then you need to arrange for additional bus schedules during the early morning hours before work, add more ferry times, carpool. We have spoken about putting a car-pooling system into place in the past. What happened to that?

Overall, I think that the drastic increase could have been handled better; they didn't need to increase that much and as fast as they did. But overall, we're not addressing the massive transportation problems we have in Hamilton. We've got to come up with some creative solutions to the main problem of how to get people from point A to point B.

Common Councillor candidates John Harvey and Anne Kast along with Alderman candidates Pamela Ferreira and Kathryn Gibbons were not available for comment.