Elon’s chief of police has unholstered a plan that could introduce paid parking to the municipality’s bustling downtown in order to bring additional revenue into its coffers.
Police Chief Kelly Blackwelder appeared before Elon’s town council on Tuesday to lay out the details of this proposal, which had, until recently, been a nonstarter with most of the town’s elected leaders.
During her pitch, Blackwelder acknowledged that the concept of paid parking has been on the radar for some time for reasons that go beyond the simple desire to ration a scare public resource.
“Paid parking, has for years, been part of a larger conversation,” she explained to the council, “as we’re trying not only to change behavior but find sustainable sources of revenue.”
Blackwelder added that her preference would be to restrict paid parking to the downtown area during the times when the town’s police department already conducts parking enforcement. This schedule currently calls for 6 hours of monitoring on weekdays during the 196 days when Elon University is in session. The police chief did not recommend charging drivers to park after hours, on weekends, or during the summer break.
Blackwelder went on to suggest that the council could ease into this plan by charging a fee for 75 of the downtown area’s most heavily-used public spaces. She conceded that the council could, at its discretion, expand the impost to as many as 112 spaces when factoring out spots that may be lost to a proposed expansion of the sidewalks along one block of Williamson Avenue.
As for the financial particulars of this proposal, Blackwelder yielded the floor to Sebastian Ortega and Joe Weiler with T2 Systems, which offers paid parking as part of its panoply of products and services.
Ortega began by assuring the council that his firm’s approach to metered parking is not nearly as intimating as it may appear at first blush.
“The agenda says ‘paid parking’ and that usually blows people’s minds,” he confessed. “But it’s really about making parking better and more efficient.”
Ortega and Weiler proceeded to describe a couple of scenarios for the introduction of paid parking to Elon’s downtown area. These models envisioned a parking charge of $2 an hour applied to either 75 or 112 spaces in the center of town. In lieu of old-fashioned parking meters, drivers would use physical kiosks to pay this fee or scan a QR code to access an online payment portal. Meanwhile, the town’s one-person parking enforcement detail would be equipped with handheld readers to issue citations to drivers who park without paying the fee.
According to T2’s representatives, this setup would bring in an annual haul of $138,915 if 75 parking spaces are metered, or $207,446.40 if 112 spots are concerned. The pair estimated another $54,880 in penalties, which would be offset by $24,649.35 in first-year startup expenses as well as a yearly maintenance charge of $5,928.
In the end, the firm’s representatives predicted that the town would net between $169,145.65 and $237,677.05 from this high-tech approach to paid parking. They went on to add that the council could eventually expand the program to residential areas where on-street parking has been a problem – with the provision of free parking passes to residents who live in these neighborhoods.
The council, for its part, was generally quite open to this proposal – despite its prior resistance to the concept of metered parking.
Recalling this traditional hesitance, Elon’s mayor Emily Sharpe suggested that the council could acclimate itself to idea of paid parking by metering 27 spaces in the core of downtown. This so-called pilot program was shot down by councilman Randy Orwig, who insisted the council might as well commit itself fully if it decides to start charging for parking.
Sharpe admitted that she had only broached this half-step due to the misgivings that Orwig and other council members have previously raised about metered parking.
“I’ve changed my mind on it,” Orwig replied. “This is a really good move, I think.”
The rest of the council seemed to share Orwig’s revised opinion in view of the information presented on Tuesday.
Anticipating this about-face, Elon’s town manager Randy Orwig rolled the potential fees from paid parking into an addendum to the proposed municipal budget that he shared with the council in March.
In addition to $172,117 in possible spending reductions, Roeder proposed $240,000 in additional revenues that included an estimated $100,000 in parking fees from the downtown area and another $100,000 from residential neighborhoods.
In the meantime, Blackwelder informed the council that the manager’s original budget had already included $10,062 for T2’s handheld reader for parking enforcement along with annual subscription fee of $4,428 to cover the software for the device.
