STARKVILLE — Hamp Beatty left Tuesday’s board of aldermen meeting with a half-victory.
The Ward 5 alderman successfully lobbied his colleagues and Mayor Lynn Spruill to gather information for adding kiosks at the Cotton District so people could pay for parking with credit cards. His effort to delay the return of paid parking to the area until the city had that information in-hand failed by a 5-2 vote.
The city contracted with ParkMobile and implemented paid parking on March 15 for 186 spots along University Drive in the Cotton District — from Montgomery Street to Mississippi State University’s boundary. It then suspended the program in late April due to citizen and visitor complaints over insufficient signage, lack of public awareness for the program and grumbling over the lack of ways to submit payment.
Aldermen amended the city’s parking ordinance earlier this month to more clearly allow for paid parking and voted to restart the program in the Cotton District on June 3.
ParkMobile requires users to download a mobile app and scan a QR code on signs posted every few parking spots in order to pay. Beatty said that “cuts out” people without smartphones who would be willing to pay with credit cards.
City officials have begun talks with a third-party company who can provide kiosks that accommodate credit card payments and are compatible with ParkMobile.
“Let’s tie our loose ends together and get a plan in place,” Beatty said Tuesday. “If we’re going to put some kiosks in … let’s get all that in place before we reinstitute paid parking.”
The city wrote 648 tickets for failure to pay for parking in the weeks ParkMobile was active in the Cotton District, amounting to a potential $16,200 in fines violators can either pay or contest in municipal court. Tickets are $25 each.
Ward 1 Alderman Ben Carver moved to exempt those tickets “on good faith,” as most were issued to visitors who may not have known about the service. Beatty seconded, adding to the motion that paid parking not return until the city at least decides on whether to use kiosks.
“The $16,000 worth of parking tickets we wrote, that was a horrible public relations blunder,” Beatty said. “… We might have done a good job disseminating information in Starkville, but we did not do a good job disseminating information to people in Madison, Gulfport … and Memphis who rolled in here for Super Bulldog Weekend and got popped with tickets.”
That drew strong disagreement from Spruill and other councilmen. Mike Brooks, who represents Ward 4, which includes the Cotton District, agreed the city rolled out ParkMobile too fast but he advised the board “stay the course.”
The harshest repudiation came from Vice Mayor Roy A. Perkins, alderman for Ward 6, who bluntly said he was tired of discussing paid parking at every board meeting.
“We need to make a decision and move on to the next governmental matter,” he said. “… We have discussed this matter the last several board meetings. Come June 3, 2022, we need to start enforcing it. .. I’m not in favor of delaying this anymore.”
Spruill noted the city had painted the lines for paid parking spots green, ordered larger signs to indicate how to pay and had sent flyers about the service in utility bills across the city.
Between that and the social media storm surrounding paid parking, Spruill claimed the public awareness argument had weakened.
“Based on what we’ve had going on, I think the word is out there,” Spruill said. “I’m less concerned with the word being out than people understanding what’s going on. … I don’t think it’s a lack of knowledge anymore.”
Kiosk cost, purpose for paid parking
The issues with adding kiosks is whether they are cost-effective, how many to add and where to place them.
Spruill has talked to John Chism with Access Control Group, who told her it would cost the city $7,000 to $8,000 per unit, which includes installation, plus $200 monthly per unit for maintenance.
Spruill doubts the kiosk will be any more effective than the ParkMobile QR codes, even with the added convenience of card payment. The nearest kiosk, for example, may be a block from where someone parked, and she doesn’t think it’s that likely they will walk a block in the opposite direction to pay, then walk to their destination.
Still, at Beatty’s request, Spruill said she’s asking Chism to visit the Cotton District, then make recommendations to the board about the number of kiosks and placement.
“It’s already exceeded any money we could hope to make,” Spruill said, noting the city’s share for the last month of ParkMobile’s service amounted to about $800. “It’s not a revenue generator.”
As both Spruill and Brooks noted, paid parking is meant to help Cotton District businesses by incentivizing turnover for those spots, rather than the same customers, or non-customers, parking in the same spots for hours at a time.
“I talked to a restaurant owner the other day who said, ‘when you guys aren’t enforcing the paid parking, my customers have nowhere to park,’” Brooks said, noting the majority of the business owners in the corridor favor paid parking.
Carver disagreed, claiming the majority he talked to disapproved.
That led Ward 4 Alderman Jeffrey Rupp to press Carver for names of those business owners.
“I won’t disclose that publicly,” Carver said.
As for the kiosks, Brooks said he’s open to the idea, but costs were a factor.
“Why we went this route is to turn the parking spots over for those businesses,” he said. “… We didn’t set out to make money on this, but we don’t need to go too far in the hole.”
Street bonds
In other business, the board approved issuing up to $10 million in general obligation bonds for paving minor, collector and arterial streets.
The bonds would be issued in multiple phases, the first phase being about $5 million, and repaid over eight to 10 years using internet use tax revenue, meaning the bonds will not require an ad valorem tax increase. Projected lottery use revenue for the city should exceed $2 million annually, according to Ward 2 Alderwoman and board budget chair Sandra Sistrunk.
The city is in its first year of a four-year capital improvement plan, which dedicates about $1.6 million annually to such projects as streets and drainage. Those projects would continue, Sistrunk said. It would “compress” that work, however, by some streets with the new bond but otherwise running concurrently with the new program.
Work would likely not start until next year. The board will host a series of work sessions to determine a timeline and what streets the bond program will improve, Sistrunk said.
The current 4-year plan paves roughly five miles of streets each year, Sistrunk said. She hopes the first bond will pave a total of eight to 10 miles.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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