The city’s Parking Committee has been bandying about some ideas on how to ease the parking issues downtown. Creating time-restricted parking – and enforcing it – is an idea already in effect. It’s meant to keep a steady stream of fresh faces downtown who are looking to spend their walking-around money.

All that’s well and good; there’s good reasoning behind restricting parking and, if there’s a rule, it should be enforced. Otherwise it’s just a suggestion.

A new idea, a pie-in-the-sky, wouldn’t-it-be-nice kind of vision, is to build a parking garage in downtown Poulsbo. There are many things yet to be decided: its location, size and — this is the big question — how are they going to pay for it?

Mayor Becky Erickson guessed a new parking garage would cost $3 to $6 million. That’s a lot of money for a city that’s still scratching its head on how to pay for its new city hall.

The city is still crossing its fingers and hoping against hope that its current, and soon-to-be old, city hall will be snacked up by some developer with extra cash to spend. To date, they have not received one nibble of interest. And the city officials’ insistence that the building is so old and decrepit that it needed to be replaced isn’t much of an advertising campaign.

While a shiny new parking garage may alleviate the downtown parking woes, the city should focus on paying for city hall before eyeing that next big construction project.

Poulsbo is a small town with big dreams. Dreams are good, of course, but they come at a cost. And the bill for a new parking garage is one the city can’t cover right now.