Downtown Improvement Board member John Peacock yesterday asked the DIB Parking and Traffic Committee to look at ways to increase its revenue. He suggested that the committee look at expanding the paid parking areas, changing the hours when paid parking is required, establishing a one-hour minimum parking fee and charging more for parking closer to busy Palafox Street.
Peacock said that a lot of cities are using parking fees to enhance their downtown infrastructure to attract more business ownership in their downtown area.
“A lot of this, on my end, is being driven by seeing if we can take revenue to another area,” said Peacock,”and take that revenue to make improvements downtown.”
The Mayor’s Urban Redevelopment Advisory Committee had recommended in its November 2012 report that parking fees should be based on “market prices” and that all parking meter revenue should be “utilized for public improvements and beautification.”
[Note: The URAC report also recommended that the mayor take control of parking away from the DIB, but there has been no movement on that recommendation. It wasn’t brought up at the Parking committee meeting and the mayor had no representative at the meeting.]
Mayor Ashton Hayward talked at his Nov. 5 “Mornings with the Mayor” about the appearance of downtown Pensacola.
“What I really would like to see is the downtown looking cleaner,” said Hayward. “I hear a lot of complaints from the business owners. As many things that came out of the URAC committee, we should make sure that our downtown looks attractive.”
The mayor did not talk about raising parking revenue or taking control of downtown parking.
Peacock and the DIB executive director, Ron Butlin, cited Tarragona Street as an area they would like to converted to paid parking. They claimed that free parking on that street, which is only two blocks from Palafox, is heavily used by employees of downtown businesses and the spaces aren’t rotating as often as they would like.
Butlin also mentioned trying to increase usage of the garages on Intendencia Street and at the Blanchard Judicial Center.
While the DIB parking fund has a positive cash flow, its cash revenue dropped last year by $14,672 from $524,706 in 2012 to $510,034 in 2013. It has had net losses, excluding extraordinary items, the past two years — 2012 ($8,802), 2013 ($26,993). (Note: The cash flow was positive when the depreciation expenses were backed out.)
The Parking Fund does contribute about $80,000 a year to help DIB cover its overhead.
There may be hitch in this effort to take increased parking revenue and applying it to other downtown projects. The Parking Committee chairman Mark Bednar pointed out that the loan covenants may require that any increases in revenue may first have to go to paying off the loan for the new meters.
The discussion closed with Butlin saying that he would work up 20 items regarding parking that he will bring back to the committee in December. Peacock said that any policy changes would be vetted at town hall meetings for downtown businesses.
However, all seemed to be on board with changing parking.
“We can’t sit there and do nothing and hope for something else to happen,” said Peacock. “We can bat around the direction, but we’re going to try to move this thing forward one way or another.”