Board of Aldermen 10-13-2020 Page 59
about particular restaurants or bars that have an occasional customer that doesn’t want to drive. | think an
alternative that we could talk about it committee is maybe we gave each one of these bars a parking space
where they won't get ticketed. And if they have more than one person getting drunk in there that needs to
leave a car, we have got a bigger problem. So | think there’s a lot of issues with this that have not been
resolved and it ought to go back to committee. And I’m not one for usually sending things back to
Committee as you may have seen.
President Wilshire
Alderman Clemons.
Alderman Clemons
Thank you, Madam Chair. | have a question for you to Director Cummings if | could. | believe | heard and
please jump in | am wrong Alderman, but | believe | heard Alderman Laws say that the revenue loss was
going to be more to the $112,000.00 range and he said that he spoke to you about that. Can you expand
on that a little bit? Is that $112,000.00 a year because the Fiscal Note said $250,000.00, well $225,000.00
to $250,000.00 would be the potential loss. So | am curious how that other number came into your
conversation?
Director Cummings
Yes thank you so a couple points on that. We know on average, and | shouldn’t say on average, but
somewhere between 40 and 60% say 60% because that’s what is has been the last couple of years of the
revenue have been from overnight parking. And so | think last year we got something just under
$400,000.00 in revenue actual monies in. Of that, I’m sure some of it was not solely overnight but other
fines but when you take 60% of that we came into the range of $230,000.00 | think is what it is;
$230,000.00... So that is basically if we were not doing overnight parking just using last year as an example
there would be a loss of $230,000.00 or something to that effect. That is because we wouldn’t be doing
and | think where Alderman Laws’ analysis is slightly different than mine, he’s actually adding in the $10.00
back. But we are not going to be able to cover costs by actually doing the shifts and so it is going to just be
lost money. So unless we can do more and no wants to ticket. But if we can make up the revenue by
ticketing in some other manner during the days or something like that, then maybe we could do a couple
shifts at night to actually you know make up the loss of revenue that we would be seeing.
Alderman Clemons
| am sympathetic to the reason why this came up in the first place. But think there are other ways we can
do this. | think that we have to prioritize our residents and | think that if that means that we have to expand
where we allow the overnight parking into areas like where | live on Ash Street, we don’t have it. We have
a lot of apartments and things like that in my neighborhood, down this end of Ash Street. And | am sure
that there are other areas of the City that also are affected. And if we can come up with a way that we can
make up for some of that and help our residents out in that way by giving them basically permission to park,
then the occasional person that maybe can’t drive home can call the Parking Department and have their
car put on a list for that night because that’s in the Ordinance right now. | am going to support Alderman
O’Brien’s motion to send it back to Committee, because | don’t want to kill this Legislation. | think it’s a
worthwhile discussion, | think that we need better facts and figures and ideas of what we can do. | think we
need to hear more from residents. | think we need to look at and hear from the City Clerk of how many of
those parking passes in French Hill and the Tree Streets are actually sold, do we need to expand that or
are we sold out, is that the reason we are having a problem. So there’s more questions that | have than
answers so | am going to support Alderman O’Brien’s motion. Thank you.
Alderman Klee
Thank you, Madam President. I’ve gone round and round with overnight parking. And while | would love to
