Bailey, supporters unveil initiative to overturn Balboa Park paid parking

The fight over paid parking in Balboa Park isn’t over yet.

A group led by former Coronado Mayor and current District 2 city council candidate Richard Bailey filed paperwork Friday to begin collecting signatures to repeal and prohibit paid parking in the park.

The petition, published in the San Diego Daily Transcript Friday, means they can start the formal signature-gathering process, either to force the council to consider overturning the policy or to put the issue before voters on an upcoming ballot.

After immense backlash at the rollout of the program, council members joined calls to suspend fees for city residents. Mayor Todd Gloria preempted a council vote by announcing a partial repeal, giving city residents free parking in seven of the park’s twelve lots but maintaining fees for non-city residents.

The city will begin enforcing the policy next week. They’ll start issuing warnings on March 9 and issuing citations after March 16.

Also on Friday, a group pursuing a potential property tax on city residents to pay for Balboa Park upgrades — and prohibit paid parking in the park — announced they decided against putting the measure on the 2026 ballot. They’ll aim for 2028 instead.

Joining Bailey as proponents for the anti-parking fee initiative are David Cohn, owner of Balboa Park’s Prado restaurant, through his prominent Cohn Restaurant Group, Barbara McColl, a founder of the Patrons of the Prado and Cassidy Bartolomei.

The language in the initiative calls for ceasing enforcement of metered parking along the park’s perimeter, particularly anywhere south of Upas Street, west of 28th Street, north of Russ Boulevard and west of Sixth Avenue, including the meters lining the street on the park side.

Inside the park’s perimeters it would preclude the city from enforcing or establishing any long-term metered or paid parking.

But Bailey said the potential measure wouldn’t take paid parking in Balboa Park off the table forever. It would, however, instead require the council to ask voters to make paid parking a dedicated revenue source for the park.

“If San Diego, the leadership, actually puts forward a plan and gets buy-in from the stakeholders at Balboa Park and the broader San Diego community, well, then I think voters are more than willing to pay for real investments,”  Bailey said.

The initiative also calls for the city to refund any pre-paid parking passes if they cease to collect parking fees.

The group would need to gather roughly 80,000 signatures from registered city voters to put the measure on a ballot. Bailey said they’re instead shooting for the lower threshold of 24,000 signatures from registered voters to put the initiative onto a council docket.

Bailey said he’s confident that if they are able to force the council to vote on the measure that the members would repeal paid parking outright.

For several months now Bailey has been gauging support on this issue through his website repealthefees.com. The Lincoln Club, led by former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, is now relying on that same website in their effort to repeal a trash fee the city passed last year.

Bailey said around 12,000 people expressed interest through the website in signing either initiative. That’s about half of what’s needed to force the free parking petition in front of the council and nearly 15% of the signatures they’d need to place it on a ballot.

In recent years, multiple well-funded signature gathering efforts failed to qualify for the ballot. But the county’s Registrar of Voters last year changed how it evaluates signatures, making it easier for initiatives to qualify, as Voice of San Diego reported.