Balboa Park announcing “free parking” on Martin Luther King Jr. Day is not a gift. It’s an insult wrapped in a press release.
After weeks of backlash, vandalized parking kiosks, collapsing museum attendance, and elected officials openly backtracking on their votes, the City of San Diego and Balboa Park’s administrators apparently decided the solution was to waive parking fees for exactly one day – a national holiday honoring a man who spent his life fighting economic injustice, structural inequality, and the quiet ways systems exclude people under the guise of order.
Free parking on MLK Day isn’t magnanimous. It’s a PR move so tone-deaf it borders on parody…