The owner of several dozen longtime parking spaces in Chinatown – commonly called the Tyler Street parking lot – filed a lawsuit earlier this month, accusing a city commission of improperly blocking the use of the spaces.

The Chinese Christian Church of New England, which owns the spaces, argued in a court filing that the Boston Air Pollution Control Commission acted improperly in a hearing last month when it denied the church an exemption from the city’s parking freeze. Without the permit, the Church had to stop use of the 30 spaces that had been leased for years by Tufts Medical Center.

The church in short claims that the city commission had failed to recognize that the 30 spaces on Tyler Street were part of a larger lot in the area that already been granted an exemption, and that two years ago an employee from the commission “erroneously informed Tufts” that there was no permit of record for the Tyler Street lot. To keep the lot in use, a new permit had to be filed for an exemption from the parking freeze for those 30 spaces.

During a hearing last year, the agency approved most of the spaces but not the 30 on Tyler Street and then in June denied the exemption.

The commission declined commenting on the suit to the Sampan when reached last week; the church did not return multiple phone calls seeking comment.

“The Air Pollution Control Commission does not review the necessity of exemption requests for existing facilities but rather confirms that owners are in compliance with requirements of the Downtown Parking Freeze at the policy and procedural level,” Air Pollution Control Commission spokesperson Stacia Sheputa told the Sampan in early July, shortly after the agency’s 4-1 vote.

The City of Boston created its downtown parking freeze in 1976, under the rules set by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The freeze limits the availability of commercial parking spaces in all of Downtown Boston and is not specific to the Chinatown neighborhood.

For decades the spaces had been used by the hospital for patients, a neighborhood church and other community activities, including those run by the Asian American Civic Association, the publisher of the Sampan. Environmental activists argue that ending the lot for parking would significantly reduce the city’s air pollution levels and discourage car use downtown, but others say parking in the area is lacking.