OAKLAND – Allen Michaan is well known in the East Bay.

He's a longtime movie theater operator, entrepreneur, and antiques and fine art auctioneer. He is credited with restoring the city's Grand Lake Theatre to its original 1920s-era movie house glory.

Now you can add fiery street politician to that résumé.

To be sure, Michaan over the years has used his theater's giant marquee to trumpet his liberal political views. He's never been shy about talking politics with friends and complete strangers alike.

But in July – after the Oakland City Council voted to hike the cost of street parking, lengthen its enforcement hours and to start assertively dealing with parking scofflaws – Michaan found himself the leader of a growing city parking revolt.

Michaan insists that the new rates and enforcement practices are driving customers away and into neighboring cities like Berkeley, Alameda and Emeryville.

"I'm fighting for the survival of my business and for thousands of other Oakland businesses," Michaan said Thursday night before he conducted the second of two town hall meetings on the issue. "Since this program began, our business here at the Grand Lake is down at least 40 percent."

Prior to Thursday's meeting, Michaan and a handful of other Grand Avenue businesses shut down their operations in a symbolic protest against the new parking rates and practices.

Michaan dedicated a large of part of his theater's giant marquee to the issue:

"CLOSED TODAY TO PROTEST THE CITY COUNCIL's PARKING OUTRAGE," the red-lettered sign said.

Later, during the meeting that was attended by about 100 residents and local business owners, Michaan made it clear that the City Council, which is now in a summer legislative recess, needs to reconvene and roll back the parking changes, which officials say were designed to produce as much as $4 million in added revenue a year for the city.

"It's rescind or recall," Michaan said. "That's what this council is facing. It's their choice. These new parking regulations are killing us, and we're running out of time."

Should the City Council opt to leave the new parking rules in place, he said he would circulate petitions to have each of the eight council members removed from office.

During the at-times boisterous meeting, former Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris recounted his own nightmare story about receiving, and appealing, a parking ticket in Oakland.

Harris, a former state assemblyman as well, praised the crowd for getting involved and speaking out against the parking changes.

But the one speaker that the crowd ultimately paid the most attention to – aside from Michaan – was Oakland City Councilwoman Patricia Kernighan. At first Kernighan was reluctant to leave her seat and speak, but Michaan insisted that the official who represents the city's downtown address the audience.

A contrite Kernighan agreed that she and her council colleagues may have gone too far with the new parking rules in their zeal to squeeze out more revenue for the deficit-plagued city of 420,000 residents.

Indeed, when the council approved the budget for the new fiscal, they cut about $90 million from the city's nearly $500 million spending plan.

Those cuts caused dozens of workers to be laid off and many more positions to be frozen.

"Clearly, this has hit a nerve (and) personally, I want to tell you that I get the message. I think we were doing too much too fast," Kernighan said of the council's efforts to increase revenues.

The councilwoman, who says she has received hundreds of angry e-mails on the issue, said she would at least seek to have parking enforcement hours rolled back to 6 p.m. from the current 8 p.m. Kernighan added that she is in the process of persuading her colleagues to call an emergency August council session to reconsider the parking changes. She didn't speculate when that session might be scheduled.

Michaan, however, wasn't having it.

"We won't wait until September because we can't," he said, adding that he is also planning to meet soon with legal counsel to consider the possibility of filing a class action lawsuit against the city.

Meanwhile, Oakland city officials last week – perhaps feeling the heat from the growing controversy – announced two measures to make parking in the city a little easier.

The first announcement came from Mayor Ron Dellums, who said that purchased street parking time is now "transferable" from one parking spot to another as long as time remains on the kiosk-issued dashboard receipt.

On the heels of the mayor's announcement, City Administrator Dan Lindheim said Thursday that the city, starting Monday, would extend to three hours the time that an individual can purchase from a kiosk after 5 p.m.

"Oakland's dining and nightlife scene is hot; we have dozens of new restaurants that have opened up, as well as movie theaters and shopping. We want people to be able to enjoy all that Oakland has to offer in the evening hours without running the risk of getting a parking ticket," Lindheim said in a statement.