The Palm Beach Town Council sided with a group of local business owners, over the objections of town staff, and voted to extend the paid parking sessions on Worth Avenue and South County Road from two hours to three hours.
“I’m worried that we’re going to keep doing this month over month, year over year — we’re going to change it here, change it there, and it’s just going to keep going back and forth,” Town Manager Kirk Blouin told the council during the Tuesday meeting as he objected to the change.
While the council’s decision calls for an immediate change, the app used for the metered parking, ParkMobile, had yet to be updated as of Wednesday.
The discussion was a last-minute addition to the agenda by Council President Bobbie Lindsay. She said it was fueled by feedback she received from business owners on Worth Avenue, who complained that the town’s paid parking system has stifled business on the avenue.
They had called for the parking session limits to be increased, Lindsay said.
Rolled out last fall, the paid parking system replaced all the spaces — most of them free — in the 100 to 400 blocks of all the streets south of Seaview Avenue to Hammon Avenue, save for the area’s residential spaces. Drivers can pay for parking and choose their length of stay via ParkMobile.
On Worth Avenue, and South County Road, metered parking runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sessions cost $1.65 per 15 minutes, amounting to $5 an hour.
If a motorist wants to stay beyond the two-hour session, they must park in another block, as the parking zones are divided by block.
Palm Beachers with a resident parking permit can park for up to two hours at any metered space. If residents wants to stay longer, they would then start a session through ParkMobile.
Drivers can pay for parking and choose their length of stay via the ParkMobile app.
Lindsay asked why those sessions differ in length from neighboring Peruvian Avenue’s four-hour parking session limit.
The two-hour session limit was chosen to increase parking availability and turnover for what the town considers to be premium spots, Palm Beach Police Lt. Paul Alber told the council.
And it’s done just that, according to the data collected since the change was enacted, he said.
The data showed that most parking sessions during this period were below an hour and a half, Alber said. Moreover, 78% of motorists paid $6 or less for parking, which means these sessions were within the hour range, he said.
While Alber acknowledged the growing pains that come with adapting to the new parking system, he cautioned the council against making sudden adjustments.
“We’re open to making changes, (but) you’ve always been a data-driven council, (and) making a change quickly without the data supporting it, would be a step backwards to the wack-a-mole approach we had to policy making,” he told council members.
Council Member Julie Araskog questioned the data, since ParkMobile data does not include the free two-hour sessions allotted to residents with a parking decal.
She argued that the large quantity of one-hour sessions could be residents extending their parking session.
Even if that is the case, the data still shows an overwhelming number of ParkMobile users do not pay for a two-hour session, Alber said.
However, if the council wants to increase the session limits, it shouldn’t negatively impact parking, Alber said, but he emphasized that the town should wait to collect more data before it begins adjusting the system.
“In addition to the data not supporting a change, one of the reasons I would recommend against the change — the system is brand new; we haven’t even gotten through a portion of one season to gather data,” he said.
Alber’s presentation did little to sway the criticism from the handful of business owners who appeared during Tuesday’s meeting.
Stefanie Hill, owner of women fashion boutique Stefanie’s in Via Amore, argued that she has had multiple customers — residents and visitors — who’ve left the shopping area before making a purchase because they had to move their car to a new parking space.
“It’s very discouraging for the retailer to have a client say to you, ‘I’ll be back,’ and then a call half an hour later, ‘I can’t come back, I can’t find a parking spot,’” Hill told the council. “We’re trying to reach out here to get the business in Palm Beach back to where it was.”
She said the only reason there are parking spots currently available is because people don’t want to deal with metered parking at a location that has historically contained free parking.
However, Deputy Town Manager Bob Miracle said the majority of feedback he has received from residents had been supportive of the changes.
Hill’s Via Amore neighbor, Sherry Frankel of Sherry Frankel’s Melangerie, argued that the town’s data is incomplete, since the town didn’t collect data on the metered parking system’s impact to the revenue of businesses on Worth Avenue.
“These are real merchants, they all have been here a long time, and they’re telling us some feedback, and we all accepted that we would be making some tweaks to this, to figure out what works,” Lindsay said.
Alber disagreed, noting that he had recently spoken at a Worth Avenue Association breakfast where the businesses were not in consensus regarding the impact of the metered parking program.
Town Council sided with business owners and voted 3-2 to immediately extend the session limit for metered parking on Worth Avenue and South County Road from 2 hours to 3 hours. Cooney and Araskog voted against the motion.
Diego Diaz Lasa is a journalist at the Palm Beach Daily News, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at dlasa@pbdailynews.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Palm Beach council increases session time for Worth Avenue parking