Delray advisory board continues to debate paid parking for the downtown

By DAVID SEDORE, Palm Beach Business.com staff

DELRAY BEACH — Lots of ideas, little consensus other than paid parking in the downtown won’t be popular.

Tuesday night, the Delray Beach Parking Management Advisory Board once again took up the thorny question of how to impose paid parking without creating — or at least minimizing — a public relations disaster.

Ideas included metering all of the downtown, part of the downtown, limiting charges to certain hours, discounts for residents and holding off on charging altogether until the economy strengthens.

“There are so many things we can try,” City Commissioner Gary Eliopoulos said. “It’s all marketing.”

But Eliopoulos added that with tax reform reducing revenue and the city having to bear the cost of maintaining two new public garages there’s really no choice but to start charging for parking. It was on Eliopoulos’s request that the board took up the issue Tuesday evening. It first discussed paid parking last month.

The city commission is likely to discuss the issue during its February workshop before handing it back to the parking board for further work.

As it is, the city only charges for parking in the beach area east of the Intracoastal Waterway. Parking along the Atlantic Avenue corridor has been free for years.

Many downtown businesses are struggling as the economy has slowed over the past year or so. The fear is that paid parking would exacerbate the problem by dissuading patrons from shopping and dining in the area.

There’s also a balancing act that needs to be performed to meet the needs of downtown shops that do most of their business during the daytime, and restaurants and clubs that come alive at night.

And there is seasonality: The only parking problem the downtown has during the summer is too many empty spaces.

“Thirty percent of the year we have an issue with parking,” board member David Cook said. “Put meters in every lot in town … you’re really going to be running people off.”

City parking specialist Scott Aronson said paid parking is the fairest way to cover cost of providing the space, since it’s essentially a user fee. To keep parking free puts the cost on all city residents, even if they never venture downtown. Meanwhile, nonresidents who visit the area pay nothing.

“An introduction is going to be difficult,” Aronson said, “but it’s going to be one of those things that after the first attrition, (people) will get over it.”

Eliopoulos also said money from the meters could be set aside and used for improvements that would help make the downtown more attractive.

Also Tuesday, the board agreed to study parking fees and “in lieu of” fees, which the city charges new and expanding downtown businesses to help cover the cost of providing public spaces.

The parking fees now range between $16,000 and $18,000 per space; the in lieu of fees range between $4,000 and $16,000, depending on location of the business.

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