At a final public hearing before Concord’s parking committee settles on a set of sweeping recommendations for the city’s ailing parking fund, a downtown business owner had cause to reflect on the process Tuesday.
Pam Peterson said she thought the previous set of proposals the city presented last fall was “out of this world,” an ambiguous statement which engendered a moment of optimism for Matt Walsh, the staffer who’s most directly responsible for the fund.
“Out of this world good?” he asked.
Peterson then clarified that her characterization of the previously proposed changes, which among other things would have hiked the hourly rate for meters in front of her Main Street business by a full dollar, was meant in the “very, very bad” sense.
But she, too, rounded out her thought with a sense of optimism, speaking approvingly of the parking committee’s adaptations made over the intervening months.
“You listened to a lot of people here who spoke, including myself, and you made a lot of positive changes,” she said.
Peterson was one of 15 people who listened to an hourlong presentation about the parking fund’s impending insolvency Tuesday and stayed for a discussion afterward in the city council chambers.
The parking committee members will consider the input they received at a meeting next Tuesday and then prepare to deliver a final recommendation to the full city council.
Their proposal is likely to include new parking meters, increased fees and longer hours of enforcement.
The changes are designed to rehabilitate the insolvent parking fund and incentivize long-term visitors to use garages, assigning higher prices of $1 per hour for prime Main Street spaces to encourage frequent turnover.
The previous proposal that Peterson critiqued would have jumped the Main Street rate from 75 cents per hour to $1.75 and similarly boosted parking tickets for expired meters from $10 to $25. The measured recommendation on the table Tuesday would increase those tickets only to $15 and the hourly rate to $1, then $1.25 in 2021.
Another aspect of the proposal would increase the time limits on Main Street from two to three hours.
Gerry Carrier, the owner of Little River Oriental Rugs, said that seemed to him a good idea, but “today, you don’t enforce, for the most part, the two-hour limit.”
He suggested that it would take the effort of dedicated parking enforcement officers to ensure customers aren’t returning to pay for a second stint without moving their cars.
“We want turnover, but there are many, many people downtown that just feed their meter,” he said. “If we don’t have that kind of enforcement, two hours, three hours, 10 hours, it really doesn’t make any difference. They’re going to feed the meters.”
Resident Roy Schweiker, who offered a litany of recommendations, pointed to the proposed addition of new parking meters in the area of the Merrimack County Superior Court as something that to him seemed unfair.
“When you’re going to court, you may not be feeling good about it anyway,” he said, “and you have no clue how long it’s going to take you, because of the process, so you don’t know how much money to put up. And now, all of a sudden, you’re having to pay for it. I really think that’s kind of a dirty trick on people.”
More information about the proposed changes to the parking system is available at concordnh.gov/index.aspx?NID=841.
The parking committee’s recommendations will be subject to another public hearing at a full city council meeting coming in June or July.
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at
@NickBReid.)