The Butler City Economic Task Force Report submitted to the city council last month includes a recommendation that city leaders consider reducing costs and increasing revenues by way of new parking meter technology.

Actually, Butler would not be the first to use the “new” parking meter technology. Card systems or kiosks have been used for years in many cities. Anyone who parks in a Pittsburgh parking garage or many of the city’s lots has had exposure to them.

Use of such a modern system in Butler’s tier parking garage, for example, would ensure that all vehicles entering the garage pay to park. The days of finding a meter with time remaining would be gone.

The new system would still accommodate monthly parking passes but would also eliminate differences in the hourly parking rate that currently exist at the tier garage; vehicles that park on the top level currently pay 25 cents an hour, while meters on the garage’s lowest levels cost 50 cents an hour.

Implementing the new technology, which wouldn’t come cheaply but which might pay for itself over the long run, would enable the city to remove parking meters from the garage and install them on city streets, including Main Street.

The topic of Main Street meters remains a controversial issue between business owners and the city government. But it can’t be denied that the city is losing many thousands of dollars in revenue every year because city leaders haven’t mustered the courage to implement an install-meters-on-Main-Street ordinance passed by the council a number of years ago.

Merchants fear they’ll lose customers, but that argument ignores the fact that most of the downtown parking spaces are routinely used by downtown workers and business owners.

Meters on Main Street would end the “free-parking shuffle,” by which many workers avoid paying to park by moving their vehicles to a different parking space every two hours, the maximum amount of parking time allowed for a parking space.

Likewise, Main Street meters would make the meter monitors’ work easier. They no longer would have to keep track of which vehicles were parked at which space — and how long.

With meters on Main Street, meter monitors could cover more distance more quickly, presumably helping the financially strapped city gain more revenue.

Installing meters on Main Street wouldn’t result in city leaders winning any popularity contest, but the council is charged with running the city responsibly — something they’re not doing by failing to face up to the downtown parking issue.

People responding to a store’s advertising of a sale offering significant savings aren’t going to be deterred from coming to the city because they might have to part with a quarter or two to park at a meter while shopping.

The task force report is on target in pointing out that the city needs to re-evaluate its entire parking situation. But whether city leaders will actually do that remains a question.

If the council ignores the parking situation, which is a potentially easy fix, city residents won’t have reason to feel confident about the council acting on more difficult issues that the task force identified.