Is Wichita moving forward with paid downtown parking after backlash? Here’s what we know

Wichita’s broadly unpopular plan to install paid public parking across downtown by the beginning of next year has stalled out for the time being, Mayor Lily Wu and City Manager Robert Layton told The Eagle.

In the three weeks since the city’s Facebook announcement garnered more than 1,000 angry comments, many attendees at subsequent listening sessions have been similarly incensed, and a downtown small business owner’s petition to scrap the plan has collected 6,030 signatures.

“As of right now, it’s not [starting Jan. 1] because again, everything’s on hold,” said Wu, who was part of the unanimous Aug. 13 vote to delay the purchase of new parking meters and other enforcement technology until after another round of public meetings. The paid parking plan itself was approved 5-2 in January.

The City Council will take up parking again on Sept. 10 when staff summarizes that feedback. But Wu said it’s “definitely not going to be an action item” until an alternate plan can be considered.

“We’re trying to come up with ideas,” she said.

The longer the council takes to make a decision, the less likely that any new system will be in place early next year, Layton said.

“September 10 is the baseline, and then after that, depending on how the council reacts, we’ll try to do something — if not by later in September, we’ll do October,” Layton said. “Sort of an outline for a path forward. Maybe it’s a revised plan. Maybe it’s a series of options in order to achieve what we want.”

The current parking system, which includes many free stalls in and around the downtown core from Central to Kellogg and Seneca to Washington, does not generate enough money to support needed maintenance work on public lots and garages, according to city staff. Layton told the council earlier this year that for the system to be sustainable, a switch to pay-to-park, higher property taxes, or a combination of the two, will likely be necessary.

In anticipation of converting roughly 6,000 public stalls to paid parking, the council approved a contract in June that calls for increasing the fee for Idaho-based private management company The Car Park from roughly $350,000 a year to more than $2 million each of the next five years, including $460,896 a year in reimbursements for new meters.

If the council decides to move in a significantly different direction on downtown parking, the city will have to renegotiate its contract with the company, Layton said. But there are no immediate plans to lower The Car Park’s management fee.

“We’re going to be talking to Car Park about doing some enforcement and doing some things and cleaning up our garages and our lots that are part of the contract now,” Layton said. “So they’re not going to just tread water and collect a fee. We’re going to elevate the service that we’re expecting from them in our garages.”

What are people saying?

About 35 people turned out for a listening session at the Kansas Leadership Center hosted by the Chamber of Commerce on Thursday evening. Several business owners worried that the switch to paid parking could drive business to their competitors by making customers weary of downtown.

“Nobody wants to go to a restaurant, go get their nails done, go get a tattoo, if they think they’ve got to keep feeding a meter,” said Tim Dugger, a downtown property owner and resident.

“My customers aren’t going to pay for parking to come in and just get a small item,” said Karla Cumley, the owner of MoonStone, a metaphysical store on West Douglas. “They can’t be feeding meters when we have a three-hour class. I do meditation classes. Can you imagine? ‘No, stop meditating. You have to go feed your meter.’”

Others expressed concern about downtown employees who have never had to pay for parking to come into work.

“As a larger business downtown, we don’t have enough lot parking downtown for all of our employees and we’re worried about them having to pay for it,” said Tanya Tanner, office manager at IMA Financial Group.

Russell Arben Fox, a political science professor at Friends University, said he has agreed with the general framework of the parking plan since it was presented to the bicycle and pedestrian advisory board he sits on before its adoption by the council.

“We’re all a bunch of urbanists there and we’re people that are very familiar with the ways in which an overabundance of free or essentially unenforced paid parking acts as a depressive agent on urban development, on the rise of consciousness about the importance of public transportation,” Fox said.

“You have a lot of businesses that have assumed over the last twenty, thirty years — however far back you want to go — they have assumed that this parking adjacent to them is free and is going to remain free, and they have built that into their business plans,” Fox said. “Because of that status quo, you don’t get more infill development . . . You don’t have really an avenue to say, ‘Hey, we could make the downtown more livable. We could make it more walkable. We could make it more environmentally sustainable.’ Instead, you just stick with what you have.”

At Thursday’s meeting, attendees were asked to generate some of their own ideas for how the city could improve its downtown parking plan. Some of the most popular propositions included offering day parking passes, allowing storefront businesses to lease or sponsor nearby street parking for customers, and offering a set number of spaces in a garage at a discounted rate for downtown employees.