Three years after a controversial metered parking system was introduced in the village of Port Jefferson, only two things are certain – the meters are generating a substantial amount of revenue for the village and the conflict the system has created between village officials and village merchants is escalating as the village’s peak season approaches.
The latest battle revolves around a vote that was passed by the village trustees on March 15 to extend the hours of metered parking enforcement from 10 p.m. until 2 a.m. While it’s been more than six weeks since the vote was passed, the new enforcement hours have yet to begin.
There is no prospective timetable for when these hours will begin said the village of Port Jefferson’s mayor, Margot Garant. She and village merchants fear that the longer hours will strangle businesses in an economy already stricken by recession.
“Just when everybody’s going to start wanting to come out and come down here, they’re going to actually make them not want to come,” said a Daylene Cotter, a Smithtown resident who’s been managing the Cactus Salon in Port Jefferson for the last three years. “You’re going to have an empty town.”
Joe Erland, who has been a village trustee for the last four years and has been the board’s liaison to the parking committee for the almost three years, said that the extension is necessary to make back the revenue that was lost when the metered system was turned off for four months between November 15, 2009 and March 15, 2010. In addition, he feels that the later hours spread the burden of supporting the meters to the customers of businesses – like restaurants and bars – that are primarily active at night.
“The later hours have been talked about for years,” Erland said. “In fact a lot of merchants have expressed feelings about fairness saying ‘how come we’re being affected and not them?’”
If the extended hours are implemented, metered parking in Port Jefferson would be enforced for 16 hours a day, making it one of longest daily enforcement periods of any village’s metered parking system on Long Island.
The debate over the extended hours reflects a larger issue – the necessity of the metered system – that has plagued the village since June 2007 when metered pay-for-parking began.
From the village’s standpoint, the meter and ticket revenue generated from the parking system is a necessity in terms of helping to beautify and maintain the village’s parking lots. Revenue from the meters and meter-related tickets provided more than seven percent of the village’s $8.5 million budget in 2008-09.
In addition, the system helps the village lower the cost of taxes on the village’s residents. Without the metered system in place, each taxpaying entity in the village, which includes residential and commercial entities, would have to pay an additional $20 a year to account for the annual revenue raised by the meters, Garant said.
In general, the merchants feel that the system doesn’t help their businesses. They believe that the system keeps customers away.
“They promised us a seasonal solution for a seasonal problem,” John Springer, manager of the Old Port Pub and former member of the village’s parking committee, said of the parking system. “We didn’t get that. We’ve got a broken unfair divisive system.”
Springer feels that visitors are attracted to Port Jefferson because of the restaurants and the bars in the area, not because they want visit “a t-shirt town.” He and other merchants believe this extension will only aid in driving people away and thus hurt the village’s overall business community.
In March, Springer resigned from Port Jefferson’s parking committee over the idea of the extended enforcement. Two of the other three merchants – Dan Tessler and Marge McCuen – on the nine-person committee also resigned during the same time period.
When asked for evidence to support the claim that the meters are hurting business in the village, Springer said, “if businesses aren’t hurting, we wouldn’t be screaming so loudly.” The Port Jefferson Chamber of Commerce and the village clerk’s office also did not have any evidence – statistics on visitors, changes in the number of sales made by local businesses, trends in property values of the village’s commercial district – to backup this claim. Officials from the village’s business improvement district, a group founded in 1998 that consists of more than 120 local businesses working to improve the village’s quality of life and appearance, did not return phone calls for comment.
The possibility of extended enforcement hours was not the first battle in Port Jefferson’s metered parking war.
In September 2009, merchants were added to the parking committee to try to bring balance to the proposals the committee made to the village’s board of trustees.
Most of these merchants resigned.
The metered system was turned off for 35 days during the 2008-09 winter and for four months during the 2009-10 winter. These moves were made to help ease the merchant community’s burden, in terms of employees not having to pay for parking and helping businesses attract more customers, during the village’s off-peak season.
These shutdowns led to the present-day extension conflict.
Garant, who voted “No” on the March 15 vote, believes that the village parking committee’s recommendation for the later hours of enforcement was not nearly as thorough as it could have been. She said that there are many other issues – better lighting, better functioning meters, rain shelters to cover meter users during storms – that need to be addressed before the extended hours actually begin.
“The whole idea was to turn over spaces at peak times,” Springer said. “Overnight times are not peak hours.”
Opponents of the extension point to the fact that daily metered parking enforcement in Port Jefferson is currently already longer and running later than the enforcement in most other Long Island towns that employ similar metered parking systems. In Northport, Babylon, Huntington and Great Neck Plaza, parking in the metered lots ends at 6 p.m. and is enforced for either nine or 10 hours a day. In Rockville Centre, parking at most of the 730 single-head meters is enforced between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. But there are some meters, in particular those located near the restaurants and shops, which are enforced until midnight, said Glenda Daum, senior clerk typist for the village of Rockville Centre.
If and when Port Jefferson’s new hours of enforcement begin, parking in the village’s nearly 700 metered parking spaces will be enforced from 10 a.m. until 2 a.m.
In response to the later hours of enforcement compared to that in other Long Island villages, George Westbay, who chairs the village’s parking committee, said, “We as a village don’t really get started until six, seven o’ clock. That’s when people are coming here. Port Jefferson is more unique than those places and therefore its parking needs are more complicated than just turning the meters off at 6 p.m. and calling it a day.”
Westbay estimated that the extended hours of enforcement would have generated more than $79,000 in meter revenue had they began on March 15 and ran until November 15. That money would help make back the estimated $46,000 of meter revenue lost from the most recent shutdown period. Westbay determined these values using the monthly revenue the meters have generated since the system was turned on.
“Revenue is always good,” Kevin Bates, the village’s new parking administrator and a 12-year resident, said. “So if we can get more money into the village and improve the infrastructure of the neighborhoods where the meters are collecting the money, that’d be a great thing.”
The revenue generated from the meter payments is stored in a capital fund, which contained more than $400,000 at the end of the 2008-09 fiscal year. This capital fund is used for repairing and beautifying the village’s five metered lots and 22 parking meters. Around $140,000 of the money in the capital fund is currently being used to improve the lighting in the village’s Meadow lot, the parking lot behind the stores on the west side of Main Street. These improvements will include better luminance, more efficient bulbs and different pole sizes and structures, Bates said. The village is in the process of taking bids from various companies that are interested in installing the new lighting system. Once a company is selected, the new system will follow, Bates said.
This capital fund is separate from the village’s general fund, which is where the more than $200,000 in fines that has been collected thus far from metered parking violations is stored. Bates believes that using the ticket and meter revenue to make improvements in the lots and surrounding areas will bring more people to Port Jefferson, resulting in better business for the merchants.
Bates and several members of the village’s parking committee point to a study on Old Pasadena in California conducted by Dr. Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA who is known for his expertise on the science of managed parking, as evidence for why they believe the meters will ultimately help the village.
Before the metered parking system was implemented in Old Pasadena in 1993, Shoup described the city as “skid row” in his study entitled, “Turning small change into big changes,” that was published in Access in 2003. He explained that people didn’t visit the city before it was revitalized in the 1990’s and that merchants in the area didn’t want to add a metered parking system because “they feared that paid parking would discourage people from coming to area at all.” The two sides argued over the concept of metered parking for two years, Shoup said in the study.
However after reaching an agreement that said the generated meter revenue was going to be kept for the city’s public facilities – parking lots, alleys, walkways – the merchants changed their minds about the system, Shoup said in the study. According to the study’s results, Old Pasadena’s sales tax revenue increased rapidly after the meters were installed, rising from approximately $400,000 in 1992 to more than $2 million in 1999. Within five years after the meters were installed, the area’s sales tax revenue was higher than that in any of the city’s other retail districts.
In the years since the study, Shoup said that Old Pasadena’s sales tax revenue has continued to increase, thus proving that people are still visiting the city and contributing to its business in spite of the metered parking.
Westbay, Bates and other members of Port Jefferson’s parking committee are hopeful that results similar to those seen in Old Pasadena will happen in Port Jefferson. Otherwise a ceasefire in the village’s metered parking war seems unlikely.
As for the when the new hours will begin, Erland said “even though the vote went through, its been held up until everyone’s comfortable going forward.”
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