How much will city charge to park in Old Town and downtown? Council to revisit plan

The city of Wichita plans to start charging visitors a dollar an hour to park in downtown Wichita and the Old Town entertainment district starting in summer 2025.

Parking in those areas is free now, with a few exceptions.

The Wichita City Council is expected to vote on whether to approve that plan for paid parking downtown at its meeting Tuesday.

City Hall launched a public relations campaign in the summer after significant pushback to its announcement of the changes, but the new plan is essentially the same as the old plan.

City officials say paid parking throughout downtown and Old Town is needed to maintain parking lots and garages and to pay a private company to enforce parking rates downtown.

The option city staff is now recommending is much like one it has presented before. It would allow for free parking for up to 15 minutes. After that, visitors would pay a dollar an hour or a daily rate of $5 in a parking lot or $10 in a garage. Monthly rates would be offered at $35 a month in parking lots and $70 in garages.

The city’s private contractor, The Car Park, would enforce parking regulations Monday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. and 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Sundays would be free.

These rules would be enforced downtown and in Old Town. The plan excludes Delano. However, the city report said paid parking could be enforced in the new multimodal center near Riverfront Stadium, which includes a parking garage with 400 spaces, or any other new parking structure owned by the city.

“At $1.00 per hour, this Option is financially viable and provides revenue to cover future capital needs of the system,” the report reads.

In Old Town, businesses, not visitors, now pay for parking. If property owners want to keep the parking system as is, the report says, the city would have to create a 2% percent Community Improvement District sales tax and raise rates to $15 per space per month for business owners — double what owners now pay.

“The revenue generated from these actions would finance operations, maintenance, security and enforcement of time limits in Old Town, for both on-street and off-street parking in the public parking lots and structures,” the report said.

According to the same agenda report, the city has lost out on $532,212.67 a year since 1999 for not enforcing parking agreements in Old Town. That’s $13.3 million over 25 years.

“What we have been told by business representatives is that they negotiated that the agreements would continue into perpetuity, so they would continue on past the [expiration of the Old Town Tax Increment Financing District], in exchange for rate stability,” City Manager Robert Layton said in an interview with The Eagle.

“I can’t find any action by the council that formalized that,” Layton said. “Now we have a chance to correct that.”

The city has created some carve outs for free parking under the recommended plan, including handicap accessible parking and loading and rideshare parking. Special events can also petition the city to adjust parking rates during certain time periods. The city lists the Old Town Farm and Art Market as an example, saying it could petition the city for free parking during its Saturday events.

The city staff recommends the city Council approve this option. The staff says that it would bring in $452,645 in revenue in its first year of implementation and more than a half a million by the third year.

Deferred maintenance

The City Council had already approved changes to city laws earlier this year to blanket downtown with paid parking meters and to empower private parking enforcers to issue parking citations. In June, the council approved a contract with The Car Park that’s expected to cost the city more than $12 million by 2030.

Previously, the city said it is pursuing paid parking because it needs more money to maintain existing parking options. City officials say the downtown parking fund has been operating at a loss for the last five years.

The city also claims to have $18 million in deferred maintenance, mainly in its existing parking garages, including $4.3 million in the Emporia Garage near the future site of the downtown Biomedical Campus, which will house Wichita campuses for the University of Kansas’ School of Medicine and its School of Pharmacy along with health professions students from Wichita State and WSU Tech.

Much of that will be able to be paid for by deferring or canceling some capitol improvement projects, according to the agenda report.

The city built that parking garage in 1994 for the State Office Building that Gov. Sam Brownback’s administration closed in 2014. The office building was later sold to developer Sudha Tokala and converted to a private osteopathic medical school while the parking garage remained under city ownership. It is located in the Center City South TIF district, an area where the city plans to use TIF, or future property tax increases in the district, to pay for a new parking garage for the Biomed Center.

“That’s the beauty of the plan, as we’ve recommended it, is I will now have money that we can put in for ongoing maintenance and addressing any other issues before they become really, truly deferred maintenance,” Layton said. “Let’s say we have an elevator that has to be replaced or upgraded or whatever, we’ll now have the capital resources to do that.”

The city’s agenda report also identifies projects the city plans to eliminate or delay to pay for the $18 million in deferred maintenance. They include a $5 million floodplain mitigation project, funding for a Fire Department records management system, more than $1 million in street and pedestrian crossing projects, a parking lot for parks and recreation and $375,000 a year that would have paid for sidewalks and $625,000 a year for traffic signal projects.

“Some of them we’re just deferring,” Layton said. “For instance, we’ve had $5 million put aside as a grant match for approval for a drainage project out west. Well, we tried twice to get the grant, and we haven’t received it. So there’s no need for that $5 million.

“That’ll actually get us through almost two years, the first two years of improvements.”

A city document shows that, adjusted for inflation and construction contingency, the total number for deferred maintenance would likely be closer to $20.5 million over the next seven years.

The deferred maintenance projects listed by the city aren’t all deferred maintenance. They include new surveillance cameras at all of the city’s parking garages and new parking equipment, including software and roll down doors, needed to enforce new parking restrictions. Those expenses total $2.3 million in 2025 alone.

Layton on Friday said the city plans to correct those numbers by Tuesday’s council meeting.

The city’s documents show the city plans to use $3.1 million out of the parking fund for expenses in 2025. The documents do not say how much of that is going to the Car Park or for equipment used by the company to enforce the new restrictions. The documents say the city would end the year with a $452,645 net gain under the new paid-parking plan.

Assistant City Manager Troy Anderson told The Eagle Friday that pending the approval of the parking plan, contracts with the Car Park would have to be amended.

“They’re still going to be providing operations, management, enforcement, those kind of things,” Anderson said. “Primarily, we’re just going to focus on sort of those management fees and [capital expenditures].”

The council previously delayed implementing paid parking after pushback from the community.

During a meeting last month where the council delayed voting on a parking option, several business owners spoke out against paid parking, saying they feared it would deter people from visiting their businesses.

“Stay out of our way of making money,” Dan Norton, owner of downtown brewery Norton’s Brewing Company, said during the November meeting.

The council will vote on the plan at its Dec. 17 meeting, which starts at 9 a.m. in City Hall. Residents can speak about the parking plan during public comment on the item or contact their council member.

This story was originally published December 13, 2024 at 1:49 PM.