Jason Stockfish | [email protected]
Council dealt with an interim report regarding paid parking on July 12, nearly two months into the second season of the municipality's program.
Christine Nadon, director of legislative and protective services, presented council at its committee of the whole meeting with a recommendation and an alternative recommendation in administration’s paid parking program report.
Understanding that council voted in favour of the current program, administration’s recommendation was that committee receive the report for information.
The alternative recommendation was that committee recommend council approve discontinuing the 500 hours of free parking program and move to a full exemption program for residents.
Nadon noted that there have been some successes of the program so far, as well as some significant challenges.
One major success of the program is that $114,487 of revenue had been generated from paid users from May 16 until July 7.
Another significant success was that 1,413 permits had been issued to registered residents.
However, a related challenge was that only 147 of those registered users were tapping in and out using the app on their mobile devices.
Perhaps the most significant challenges for municipal staff is that requiring people to use technology when parking downtown has led to “irate customers” (mostly residents) and staff having to try providing technical support to users struggling with the technology.
She added that the service provider explained the issue was usually related to the user, the device or the network in most cases.
“Despite those challenges, we do feel that technology is one of the strengths of the program and definitely the way forward with the paid parking program in Jasper,” Nadon said.
“But we are hesitant to pursue the implementation of the 500 hours of parking (for residents), because it is unique to Jasper and was developed by HotSpot only for us and therefore it is a little more difficult to provide technical support.”
Nadon noted that administration’s hesitancy is only increased by the level of friction that the program has created with residents.
“It’s not a very pleasant statement, but I would like to highlight that our staff have been on the receiving end of a lot of difficult situations, people being very irate to levels that we’ve never seen before, even for taxes or utilities,” she said.
“So, continuing impacts on our staff’s mental health and just (their) ability to deal with other projects and with day-to-day tasks, and also develop the paid parking project more thoroughly for future years… is where we could reorient our resources if we were to discontinue the 500 hours program.”
Nadon concluded by noting that administration recognized council made the decision to implement this program, which is why the option to do away with the 500 hours and create a full exemption for residents was only an alternative.
After her presentation, each of the members of council took an opportunity to empathize with Nadon and municipal staff.
Coun. Scott Wilson made the point that residents should enjoy having free parking and understand that there would be some details that would need to be worked out.
“There are many communities across the province (and) across the world that have paid parking, period—zero free credits, zero free parking for anybody in the community,” he said.
“We have made an effort to accommodate residents, and residents need to make an effort to accommodate paid parking.”
Coun. Wendy Hall echoed similar sentiments.
“It’s free parking (and) it’s a new program (and) there’ll be bugs and kinks to work out,” Hall said.
“Free downtown parking is publicly subsidized storage of privately owned possessions. It’s high real estate. Land costs money.”
Coun. Rico Damota voiced his desire of finding a resolution that would satisfy the complaints from residents and the concerns raised by Nadon while keeping paid parking intact.
“There’s got to be a happy medium somewhere instead of saying, ‘Let’s stay the course and let staff take the punishment’.”
Damota added that if people are saying, ‘This isn’t working, help us,’ he feels compelled to help them.
“I want to work with council, and I want to work with administration for a better solution for the community, because right now it doesn’t seem to be working well.”
Committee did not recommend any changes to the program and received the report for information.
