BAY CITY, MI - The City of Bay City’s downtown parking enforcement plan is starting to shift gears.
The Bay City Commission on Monday, Oct. 19, unanimously approved moving the parking violations bureau out of the hands of the Downtown Development Authority and into the control of the Bay City Department of Public Safety.
In addition to shifting the responsibility of enforcement over to the police, the city will not enforce parking rules for the remainder of 2020 and plans to resume enforcement in 2021.
“Right now the (parking) ambassadors are not working downtown because of COVID, so this our chance to look at some different avenues for parking - so that’s what we’re going to do,” said City Manager Dana Muscott.
The days of having your heart drop as you see a neon-vested parking ambassador approach your car to place a ticket on it are on hold - but a different type of enforcement may be on the way.
“We’re going to look at some solutions to parking that are different to what the DDA did,” said Public Safety Director Mike Cecchini.
No decision was made yet on what kind of enforcement methods will be implemented but Cecchini mentioned parking meters as a possibility in the future.
“There has to be enforcement to ensure that people coming to downtown have the ability to visit establishments, so I believe metered parking might be a solution to that," he said.
Commissioner Jesse Dockett suggested that if meters end up being picked as a solution that perhaps a system could be established to allow for an initial free hour or two of parking, citing concerns about business owners and employees parking downtown in front of their or neighboring businesses for extended amounts of time.
“Having a meter in place for those people and allowing two-hour parking for visitors is still an option,” said Dockett.
However, Dockett cautioned that meters are not a firm thing nor are they officially proposed yet.
“We’re not really proposing metered parking quiet yet, we’re proposing an alternative to the two hour parking....People jump to metered parking right away because that’s the one that most people are familiar with but we have not committed to any specific parking structure downtown yet," he said.
Commissioner Kristen Rivet expressed her concern about meters, citing concerns about the current economic conditions stemming from the pandemic. She said that the accessibility of parking is one of the strong features of downtown Bay City.
“I would hope that there will be a strong consideration about making sure our downtown is still a great place for people to go, that parking is cheap and there’s lots of spaces for free parking,” she said.
The change was made possible due to the Bay City official Code of Ordinances. Muscott said the ordinance allows the city manager to assign it to either the DDA or the public safety department.
Since the Department of Public Safety handles most aspects of the parking ticket functions as it stands now, this move aims to bring in the final piece of writing the citations under the city.
“It makes sense right because since his department does the appeals and it comes to him anyway," said Muscott. "I believe now we’ll be able to keep some of this revenue too, which will help with his department as well.”
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