Motorists who don't pay careful attention to the clock will now face a $20 fine. The fine quickly escalates to $50 if unpaid for 30 days and then on to $100 after 60 days.

Trustees have grumbled for years about how visitors have commented to parking enforcement officers that they'll gladly pay a $10 ticket for all-day parking. The board has also wrestled with how to deal with hospital employees parking on residential streets because imposing two-hour limits has not worked.

The increase in fines is supposed to address both of those issues, but it is more likely to impact local residents and employees than visitors.

In the first two months of the year, the police department issued 870 parking tickets, and that was with the annual holiday season suspension of the two-hour limit in the business district that was in place for the first two-and-a-half weeks of January.

We doubt that many of those almost 900 tickets were issued to visitors from out of town. More likely, they went to local drivers who found many of the Doubleday Field lot spaces taken up by huge piles of snow, not to mention all the spaces lost to towering snowbanks along streets throughout the village.

Increasing the fines for parking violations will not solve Cooperstown's long-standing parking dilemma. It is not even a well-placed band-aid on a festering problem.

It is a slap in the face to local people who must try to find parking to get to stores or jobs everyday. Most have learned to live with the daily battle to find a place to park, but the increase in fines is uncalled for.

Yes, there is the trolley system and for some, it may be an answer.

But in our opinion, the burden of the increased fine will hit local drivers the hardest and will do little to solve parking problems.

Trustees and the police committee both discussed the need to accommodate village officials who have business at the office building by increasing the number of spaces reserved for officials only parking during the same meetings when it was decided to increase the fines for everyone else.

We agree that village officials should be able to get to their important meetings and conduct village business without fear of being ticketed.

But we believe it would have been nice if they could have tried harder to find a solution that would address the same problem for the rest of us instead of reaching deeper into our pockets.