Lynchburg hopes paid parking plan drives downtown change

The city is forging ahead with no hint of hesitation as it pushes closer to its long-held goal of returning paid parking to the streets of downtown.

“I just want the minutes to reflect that everyone’s fine with moving ahead,” Michael Gillette, Lynchburg Parking Authority vice chairman and city councilman, said at a meeting this month.

“No one has cold feet.”

The city intends to start ushering in paid parking this fall with on-street changes possibly coming as early as October, according to a tentative schedule issued this month.

The downtown community, which has been watching this plan unfold since 2007, still finds itself divided over whether these changes will help or harm their burgeoning district. The stakes are high for an area still in the midst of a decades-long revitalization effort.

Downtown Lynchburg hasn’t operated under a paid parking system for more than 30 years.

The switch back is expected to entail a substantial investment of city money. The new program already has drained an initial cache of $250,000 created to get it started, and another $400,000 or more may be needed for equipment in the coming years.

Officials hope all future costs will be supported entirely by new parking

revenues.

Norman Hale, who was hired as the city’s first parking manager in 2008, has spent the past two years fine-tuning the downtown plan and reaching out to stakeholders to rally support for the pending changes.

As paid parking draws closer to becoming a reality, he acknowledges there are still some “mixed feelings” about it. But he also says he feels the community has grown to understand the plan better over time.

“It will actually support growth and development in downtown by creating the right mix of parking options,” Hale, who developed paid parking programs for Champaign, Ill., and Little Rock, Ark., before coming to Lynchburg, said.

“What we are doing is normal and is practiced in other municipalities throughout the commonwealth and the country,” he added. “It has not been proven to kill downtowns.”

Lynchburg ripped out its original parking meters back in the 1970s in an effort to help downtown businesses stay competitive in the face of the rising shopping mall culture.

But three decades later, merchants started raising concerns about what they saw as a parking shortage and called on the city to build a new deck. A 2007 study commissioned in response concluded the district had ample parking but wasn’t using the existing space efficiently.

The recommended remedy was paid parking. Analysts believe that charging for parking helps ensure that more attractive on-street spaces stay available for shoppers while long-term parkers — including downtown employees and residents who are often suspected of monopolizing prime spaces — are driven into cheaper off-street facilities.

The city has already ordered its first two parking pay stations from Duncan Solutions Inc., a Milwaukee-based vendor it contracted with in May. Unlike older parking meters, pay stations are electronic machines that can manage multiple parking spaces and accept payment by coin, credit card or cell phone.

The pay stations being shipped to the city now will be deployed on the public parking levels of the midtown deck at Main and Ninth streets and the Clay Street deck. They’ll be very similar to a temporary machine that has been operating in the midtown deck as part of a pilot program and will charge the same rates — $1 per hour with a maximum daily charge of $5.

The new pay stations are expected to activate around Sept. 1. The next phase of the plan, which calls for pay stations along Main Street, could then begin as early as October depending on availability of funds and final approval from City Council.

Council, which created the parking authority and appoints its members, will likely need to cast a vote authorizing it to move ahead with on-street pay stations. That approval may not come easily. Although council endorsed the parking study when it was first released and has been generally supportive of the program since, the concept of on-street pay stations is not without its critics among the city’s leaders.

Ward III Councilman Jeff Helgeson has pushed to get the program axed in past budget cycles, questioning whether it’s the best use of city money in a time of shrinking revenues. During a meeting last October, he also wondered if it might undo some of the progress made on downtown revitalization.

“It’s not incentivizing. It’s called terrorizing,” he said in response to arguments that long-term parkers need an incentive to get off the streets.

Other council members, such as Gillette, the Ward I representative, have been staunch advocates of paid parking. Gillette has suggested the parking authority should be revamped and made more independent in the future so its work cannot be unilaterally “rethought” or reversed by council.

To move forward with on-street pay stations, the parking program will also need to scrape together enough money to pay for the next round of equipment. An initial start-up budget set aside for it was exhausted shortly before the end of the last fiscal year — expenses included about $60,000 for the parking study and close to $70,000 in annual wages for the parking manager.

The city now expects the program to start supporting itself with revenue generated from parking fees and fines. Officials were able to pay for their first order from Duncan Solutions, a $62,693 bill, with money reaped from parking tickets.

In the budget for the new fiscal year that started July 1, all local parking revenues were consolidated into one “cost center” dedicated to supporting the downtown program. Previously, those dollars would have been dumped into the general fund.

As paid parking forges ahead over the next 12 months, the city predicts it will see a huge jump in income from both pay station fees and off-street parking permits. In all, it is forecasting close to $432,000 in parking revenue. This is compared to slightly more than $104,000 collected last fiscal year.

If revenues meet their projections, the program will end up with nearly three times as much to spend this year as it had last year. But the bulk of that will be eaten up by pre-existing costs that were once paid by other departments but are now part of the consolidated parking budget.

Examples include: maintaining the parking patrol vehicles; cleaning up city-owned parking facilities; and paying a fee to Lynch’s Landing to manage leased parking in the midtown deck.

The parking budget contains one noteworthy new cost: $133,400 for software purchases related to the new parking equipment.

The city’s contract with Duncan Solutions does not commit it to a specific payment schedule, but rather allows for equipment to be ordered as funding permits. The first two pay stations cost $9,165 apiece, according to an invoice.The city’s multi-year parking plan calls for as many as 42 pay stations. If the price per unit remains constant, that could add up to nearly $385,000. Additional money would also be required for things such as maintenance, payment processing and technical support services.

At the most recent parking authority meeting held July 13, it was noted that anxiety seems to be growing among paid parking detractors as the plan creeps closer to implementation.

“I’ve been getting stopped on the street about this quite a bit lately,” said Tom Gerdy, an authority member and downtown property owner. “Is there something we can do to let people know that we’re not just making this up or throwing darts? That this has been successful in other cities?”

The city is in the process of scheduling a community meeting to discuss the changes. The authority also expressed interest in crafting a handout summarizing the merits of paid parking.

City Manager Kimball Payne said they should continue trying to explain the intent of the parking program, but cannot expect to win universal support for it.

“Anything new will always bring up mixed emotions,” he said.