At his weekly presser this morning, Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves hinted that the city may raise its hourly rate for downtown parking.
“Fifty cents an hour is grossly, grossly undercharging for parking in our size cities in the South, it’s not even close,” he told reporters. “Right now we’re 30 minutes free and 50 cents an hour at every city parking space.”
Mayor Reeves was sharing preliminary data from the UWF Haas Center survey of over 5,000 parking customers. The survey will be used as part of the presentation the city’s parking consultant will make to the Pensacola City Council next week.
He gave these data points:
“About three out of 10 people that took the survey believe that the city runs the red lots, which I very much believe, and frankly I thought it would be a little bit lower because of the emails we get.”
“41% of people, when we asked the question, when is the most challenging time to park? And the far and away most challenging time was weekend evenings. Now, you know the city on Sundays, we don’t charge currently. We don’t charge after seven o’clock on Saturdays. So that isn’t a complaint about cost, that’s a complaint about finding parking period.”
“27% say the biggest concern when parking downtown is the limited availability of spaces and then 18% ease of purchase.”
City of Pensacola Downtown Parking Survey Results
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Recycling Saturdays
Mayor Reeves announced a recycling drop-off facility will be available every Saturday starting on Nov. 4 from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. The facility at 2759 N. Palafox Street will accept steel and aluminum cans, two types of plastics, and clean and broken down cardboard (no pizza boxes).
“It won’t be the volume at this point that we were having at the curb, but it certainly won’t be the same contamination, which is why we got here to begin with,” the mayor said.
He asked residents to pre-sort the recyclables. City employees will help upload the vehicles.
For more info, visit cityofpensacolarecycles.com.
Recycling Saturdays: To be very clear, the actual “legislative” decisions both to end weekly curbside recycling and to raise the monthly charge for sanitation services was made by the seven little council members not by Mayor Reeves. He did proposed it. Whether he actually understood the details and mechanics is unknown. Mayor Reeves’ meandering discussion of sanitation during the council budget workshop made pretty clear that he’s not really into details. He’s more about talking loud, waiving his hands, telling stories and the narrative, what communication majors like him do. If city government was run like a business and he was a real CEO and he came to the board of directors with such a crazy idea he would be fired. But, the “buck” stops with the council. Four times in September it voted to end curbside recycling. Twice it voted to approve the annual budget that ended it. Then, twice, the council voted to amend the city code to end curbside recycling. The solution is to give the job to ECUA that will provide more and better services including curbside recycling at a lower cost.