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CommentsA plan to charge for street parking in downtown Tacoma moved ahead Tuesday, as the city will immediately begin taking bids for parking pay stations to be installed next year.
Once the stations are in place -- rolled out systematically across three downtown zones this Spring -- drivers can expect an initial parking fee of 75 cents per hour, said Tacoma City Manager Eric Anderson. There will be a significant stir of adjustment as the paid parking system is implemented, Anderson said. But, Anderson noted, merchants and other downtown stakeholders involved in the planning process largely support the plan.
Key to winning buy-in from some downtown merchants who opposed previous plans was ensuring that all revenues garnered from parking kiosks and enforcement would be put back into the citys parking system.
That was the key part for me, as a merchant, said Steph Farber, longtime owner of LeRoy Jewelers.
Farber, who said he once virulently opposed paid-parking plans, but now calls himself as a convert, credited Anderson with crafting a credible compromise. In the past, these (paid parking) plans were an open-ended way just to get more money into the citys general fund, Farber said. But the city manager stipulated that the money will stay in the parking system. He took care of that, and hes convinced me.
The current plan has been a longtime coming. The city held 18 public meetings with stakeholders to solicit feedback, then later hired a parking consultant to help craft a plan as part of a grander strategy to improve the citys future transportation mobility downtown.
Were now at the implementation stage of the paid-parking part of the strategy, Anderson told Tacoma City Council members on Tuesday when unveiling a definitive time line for plan.
With the councils support, the city will immediately begin seeking bids for pay stations, with the goal of having a contract approved by October.
A public outreach effort -- possibly with a roll-around parking kiosk -- will then be carried out to prepare downtown merchants and motorists about the changes, Anderson said.
By early next year, the city will also hire two parking enforcement officers to beef up monitoring of downtown parking. Then, pay stations -- the electronic kiosks that spit out parking receipts attached to car windows -- will begin to be phased in throughout downtown, from roughly the University of Washington-Tacoma Campus to City Hall.
In all, the city has planned to buy about 150 parking kiosks, which city officials estimate will run about $8,500 apiece. Factoring in additional installation and enforcement costs, the parking plan will be covered by selling about $3 million of revenue bonds, Anderson has said.
The initial 75-cent per-hour rate likely will fluctuate upward over time, Anderson said, as the city seeks to find a per-hour price that ensures a 15 percent vacancy rate among downtown parking spaces.
Creating such a market-driven demand is key, some say, to ensuring parking spaces that are now occupied all day long experience an attractive turnover rate that continues to draw people downtown.
Finding that sweet spot means that when my customers comes downtown, they should be able to find a place to park, Farber said.
The city also will seek to make the parking system self-sustaining, with all operating costs covered by parking revenues. Estimates show that by charging 86 cents per hour, the city should be able to break even once the system is up and running, Anderson said.
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