11:40 PM CDT on Tuesday, July 18, 2006

By Doug Miller / 11 News

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Houston’s new parking commission will talk about solving some parking problems for disabled drivers on Wednesday.

KHOU-TV

Anthony Koosis, Coalition for Barrier Free Living

One of the ideas on the table is arousing controversy among activists for the handicapped. 

Feeding the meter’s a fact of life downtown unless you have a handicap parking permit.

“With a handicap tag or a handicap plate, you can park at any meter provided that it’s a working meter anytime,” said disabled parker Mike Heintzman.

A handicap hang tag is basically a free parking pass for any metered space.

Most of us can park at parking meters for only a limited amount of time.  But if you have a handicap tag, you can park at a meter as long as you want. 

Now, the City of Houston is talking about changing that and basically imposing a time limit even for people with handicap tags.

“What we want to do is create more turnover so that everybody has access to that particular parking space because most of the time their adjacent to particular buildings that are high in traffic, whether it’s for able bodies or disabled bodied citizens,” said Lilliana Rambo Houston Parking Director.

“People with disabilities have a hard enough time,” said Heintzman.

But the idea faces some opposition.

“Until they do more to have accessible parking downtown at least in some correlation to the number of people with disabilities, they shouldn’t do steps to limit where we can park and how long we can park there” Anthony Koosis, Coalition for Barrier Free Living, said.

City officials say they do want to create more handicapped parking spaces  where drivers with disabilities won’t have to feed the meter.