Beware: If you are a car shuffler, it may be the end of the road.

The City of Santa Barbara wants to stop people from moving their vehicles in and out of city parking lots to avoid paying fees.

“It’s not legal to basically take advantage of that free period by doing the shuffle,” parking programs supervisor Sarah Clark said. “This is something we see a lot of.”

Clark gave a presentation Tuesday to the city’s Finance Committee. She outlined a plan to stop people from shuffling their vehicles in and out of city lots, where the first 75 minutes are free followed by $3 an hour.

“There are a lot of people who use it two to three times a day, but there’s definitely some people you’ll see six or seven times,” she said. “They are just going in and out, in and out of the parking lot.”

Clark said she has observed it herself: “People just going around the block or not going around the block and doing an illegal U-turn sometimes on a one-way street to swing back around and get back inside.”

She said the “75-minute shuffle” causes traffic, creates delays at exits, and “you’ve got more people trying to get in and out.”

Clark said people looking to save money “create a lot of lost productivity.”

“If people and employees are leaving the office every hour to move their car, that’s not a great use of anybody’s time,” she said. “It costs us revenue that per the municipal code we should otherwise be getting.”

The proposal, which is set to go to the Santa Barbara City Council next Tuesday, comes a year after the city attempted to slash free parking times downtown and install a pay-by-plate kiosk. The city is struggling financially to keep its downtown parking fund solvent and is looking at ways to cut costs and raise fees.

Clark said the city’s parking lot system will allow users one 75-minute period per day.

“You go in, you use the courtesy period. You wouldn’t be able to use that again,” she said.

The time could be broken up into multiple lots, she said. For example, someone could get 60 minutes free in one lot and 15 free in another for a total of 75 minutes. The time could reset if a person drives into a different parking lot, or perhaps after four to six hours.

Clark said she still wants people to “run an errand, go to the doctor’s office in the morning and come out for dinner at night — things like that — and that’s not taking advantage of a courtesy period that is legitimate.”

The crackdown on the parking shuffle was just one of several proposed changes that included lowering parking permit fees and temporarily halting spending on capital projects.

The city wants to make the zero blocks on both sides of State Street between Sola and Montecito streets free to park for only 15 minutes. The amount of free time would get longer the farther away from State Street. That approach would likely lead to more turnover of vehicles downtown, but also an increase in parking ticket fees.

From Anacapa Street to Santa Barbara Street and from Chapala to De la Vina streets would expand to 75 minutes free, and beyond those blocks the free time would be 90 minutes.

In addition, the city wants to test a pilot program in the Helena lot in the Funk Zone, where people would pay at a kiosk they walk to, much like the waterfront lots.

At the same time, the city also wants to make it easier for downtown residents to park in the lots overnight. At the Ortega Lot, for example, the proposal is to reduce a monthly parking permit for the lots from $250 to $125 for downtown residents.

For commuters, the lot permit for a month during the day would go from $145 to $70 a month.

To help save money, the city plans to halt spending on capital projects, such as new signage and maintenance.

The city is expecting about a $3.1 million budget shortfall next year in its parking fund if it makes no changes.

The members of the Finance Committee — Meagan Harmon, Wendy Santamaria and Mayor Randy Rowse, who was filling in for Eric Friedman — appeared generally supportive of the plan.

“This is thinking outside of the traditional parking box, which I appreciate,” said Rowse, who celebrated his birthday on Tuesday. “You are approaching it not just from a revenue perspective, but a customer perspective as well. I think that is probably aimed more toward success than the approach from the past.”

Harmon said she appreciated the plan to reduce monthly parking fees.

“It is definitely encouraging to see we have managed to lean into the direction of lowering some of these costs and really try to encourage permit purchasing, while also figuring out how to move toward a balanced budget,” she said. “I didn’t know those two things were going to be possible.”