Council puts brakes on free parking downtown

Once again, there will be no such thing as free parking in downtown Carbondale.

Or, at the very least, you won't be able to find it in any city-owned parking lots. At Tuesday's meeting of the city council, leaders voted to reinstate enforcement of metered parking for the first time since the end of June.

That suspension, which grew out of more limited concerns about employees of downtown businesses being forced to pay for parking each day, was undertaken as a broader experiment to see if free parking, allowed for three hours at a time, would bring more consumer traffic to downtown businesses.

According to City Manager Gary Williams, city analyses of parking usage, sales tax receipts, and food and beverage receipts showed no significant change as a result of free parking.

That was frustrating news to some.

"It's disappointing, actually," Councilwoman Jessica Bradshaw said. "I thought having free parking, we would see an increase in business downtown. I certainly looked through the data, and I'm impressed with how much work city staff did. I can't say the information's not there. It's just kind of a bummer it didn't pan out."

The council voted 6-1 to resume metered parking. Councilman Adam Loos voted against it largely because the free parking program was set to sunset on its own at the beginning of 2020, and the council's action was technically not needed; Williams said taking a vote was simply an effort at being transparent. Meter enforcement will resume Jan. 2.

With that, the council opened a trickier conversation about what support to provide to employees of downtown businesses, whose concerns sparked the entire experiment with free parking. Although business owners have been able to obtain up to 10 parking passes each that allow their employees to exceed the three-hour free parking limit, several members of the council were opposed to continuing such handouts, including Mayor Mike Henry and Councilman Jeff Doherty, who said Carbondale's parking system should be supported by those who use it.

"I don't feel it's right for the city to subsidize only some of the businesses in Carbondale," Henry said. "Others have gone to great expense to build parking. I think it's up to the business owner, if he wants to encourage folks to work for him and parking is an issue, he needs to fund that."

A vote to continue the free parking pass program for business employees failed, with Doherty, Henry, Carolin Harvey and Lee Fronabarger voting against it. The council directed city staff to come up with possible fees employers might pay for parking passes on behalf of their employees, and that issue is expected to come before the council in January.