Anti-SUV vote: a mayor issues a decree to charge parking for Paris councilors in his municipality

Last Sunday, 54.55% of Parisians voted in favor of “creating a specific rate for the parking of heavy, bulky, polluting individual cars”. Exasperated by this measure initiated by Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Saint-Aignan le Jaillard ironically attacked the socialist mayor on Facebook by revealing a decree entitled “Regulation of paid parking for vehicles of Paris municipal councilors”. The seven articles that make it up are based on the “Code of Public Absurdity of Territorial Communities” written by Ugo Planchet. The mayor explains his approach. “I made the decision to take this humorous decree, because it is difficult to achieve, to respond to Anne Hidalgo's measure” before adding “It is a response to absurdity with absurdity”. The 31-year-old councilor wants to directly “make parking for the vehicles of Paris municipal councilors” who go to his town pay.

Using irony, the mayor, without any political label but with “a right-wing sensibility”, announces for example that one hour of parking will now be priced at 18 euros for Parisian councilors. For six hours or more, Parisian elected officials will even have to pay the tidy sum of 225 euros! Added to this is a “special rate” if they decide to park their bike weighing more than ten kilos in the town of Loiret, a triple rate “on February 29 of each leap year”.

The elected official, however, assures that his order has very little chance of being accepted by the prefecture. “She will take it into account. But he will definitely be rejected. I just wanted to do it because if mine isn’t enforceable by law, why would theirs be?”

At 31, the young mayor of Saint-Aignan le Jaillard wants to seize this spotlight to denounce “the contempt of Parisians for rurality”. The Parisian consultation, which cost 400,000 euros, is totally “above ground” according to him, who denounces the obsession of an elite wishing to impose “a punitive, not incentivizing, ecology”. However, the councilor declares “not to be anti-ecological” having taken a whole host of concrete measures in his commune of 619 inhabitants. “We have undertaken a major work to find water leaks allowing us to save 46,000 cubic meters of water, or half of our annual consumption. We are in the process of changing all the windows of our town hall and our public school.”

Ugo Planchet would have liked to participate in the consultation which he denounces as “proof of Parisian solidarity on a subject which concerns everyone”. A position that provokes a reaction among the socialists, the mayor declares having received “not always pleasant” messages from them. Will Anne Hidalgo respond to him in person? The subject of SUVs in any case concerns the whole of France and is not limited to the capital. According to him “it’s a fair response to the neglect of the countryside, we feel excluded even though we are directly concerned by ecology”. Current events prove him right: “the crisis in the agricultural world is the very illustration that a gap is widening between the cities and the countryside,” he concludes.