In downtown Winnipeg, you may enjoy two free hours of parking on a Saturday. Provided it's raining at the time. During Passover. And a rare swallow-tailed kite happens to be flying overhead.

While this may sound ludicrous, it's only slightly more ridiculous than the City of Winnipeg's actual Saturday downtown-parking policy, which has been described in charitable terms as vague — and less charitably as deliberately deceitful.

For the past five years, downtown parking pay stations have been emblazoned with stickers advertising "two hours complimentary on Saturday."

The stickers do not specify whether these two free hours come before you must pay for parking, after you pay for parking, or during some possible future when the polar ice caps melt, the oceans rise and Toronto-based hockey writers recognize that Blake Wheeler and Mark Scheifele deserve to be considered elite NHL forwards.

What this means is Winnipeg spent the past five years offering free parking to some downtown visitors on Saturdays while happily accepting loonies and toonies from people who either didn't see the little, blue rectangle stickers or didn't understand them.

At best, this amounted to lousy messaging. At worst, it was deliberately misleading.

But this imprecise bit of advertising appeared to become something altogether more sinister the Saturday before Christmas, when contractors working on behalf of the Winnipeg Parking Authority began handing out tickets to motorists who did not pay for two hours of Saturday parking as soon as they left their vehicles.​

The about-face sparked immediate outrage from motorists. And it was apparently reversed within days through a decree by Winnipeg chief transportation and utilities officer Dave Wardrop, a senior city bureaucrat whose portfolio includes the WPA.

On the surface, it may be tempting to blame the parking authority for this change in policy. As a special operating agency, the WPA is supposed to operate somewhat independently and has on occasion surprised bureaucrats and elected officials alike.

But the authority can be directed to provide more revenue for the city. On no fewer than three recent occasions, Winnipeg's elected officials have made decisions that effectively siphoned parking revenue away for other purposes.

The Winnipeg Parking Authority was handed the $1.8-million cost of demolishing the Civic Centre Parkade. (CBC)

Parking revenue paying for demolition

The first of those decisions was made in 2016, when the WPA was handed the $1.8-million task of demolishing the Civic Centre Parkade.

The Princess Street parkade, located within sight of city hall, was shuttered in 2012 due to structural concerns and was effectively marked for death when the city made the financially disastrous decision to abandon the Public Safety Building for a new police headquarters on Graham Avenue.

On one hand, it may sound logical to ask the parking authority to demolish one of its own assets. On the other hand, it could be argued the $1.8-million price tag for its demolition, never mind other associated remediation costs, should have been anticipated as part of the new police headquarters budget.

That budget was approved by city council at $135 million in 2009. It eventually rose to $213.5 million, thanks to scope inflation and cost overruns at a project that has been under RCMP investigation for more than three years.

The city could have handed the demolition task to its property department or one of its offshoots, municipal accommodations, which manages city buildings. By giving this job to the parking authority, it effectively diverts $1.8 million worth of parking revenue into a capital project.

City raids parkade sale money

But that decision pales in comparison to an even more dramatic financial decision undertaken this fall, when Mayor Brian Bowman and council finance chair Scott Gillingham put together the 2018 budget.

Winnipeg's spending plan for next year calls for the cancellation of a six-year-old city plan to devote $5 million toward the construction of a parkade on the east side of the Exchange District.

In 2011, council voted to set aside this money, which was part of a $23.6-million windfall the city realized when it sold the Winnipeg Square Parkade, a facility former St. Boniface councillor Dan Vandal called "the gold mine at Portage and Main."

The parkade below Winnipeg Square was sold in 2009, netting the city $23.6 million. Two years later, council promised to spend $5 million from the windfall on a parkade in the east Exchange District. (Submitted)

When the parkade was sold, council promised to spend the proceeds on parking improvements. As of last year, $10 million of cash sitting in the city's land operating reserve was still considered "payable to the Winnipeg Parking Authority."

Council, however, voted this month to siphon away half that money and effectively kill the East Exchange Parkade. While some of the cash will be spent on street improvements on both sides of the Exchange, the bulk of the raided reserve — $3.5 million — will be used to top up the city's urban forestry budget.

At budget time, parking authority chief operating officer Randy Topolniski made it clear this was not his agency's decision.

Raise parking rates to hold off transit cuts

But city council's whimsy when it came to parking revenue didn't stop there. The very same 2018 budget, which initially called for increasing downtown parking rates by $1 an hour, was later amended to boost hourly parking rates by $1.50 an hour in order to stave off Winnipeg Transit cuts.

The $1-an-hour boost was supported by the Downtown Winnipeg Business Improvement Zone, which has long recognized that boosting the price of on-street parking helps drive all-day parkers onto surface-parking lots and into parkades.

Winnipeg Transit service cuts are no longer planned for 2018, thanks to an additional increase in parking rates. (CBC)

But the $1.50-an-hour hike, devised several days before a council budget vote, was denounced by both the Downtown Winnipeg BIZ and the Exchange District BIZ as excessive and unsupported by research.

That is a nice way of calling the hike a cash grab, even if it does amount to robbing motorist Peter to pay transit-using Paul.

But the sum total of this parking-rate hike, the diversion of the Exchange parkade money and the addition of the Civic Centre demolition costs amounts to a multi-million-dollar parking-revenue gouge undertaken by elected officials.

That makes a single-weekend Saturday-parking cash grab pale in comparison, as heinous as that may seem on its own.