Fort Smith loses money on downtown parking meter maintenance, enforcement

Fort Smith is on pace to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on parking meters in the downtown area, according to financial reports from the city’s department of finance.

The unaudited draft for the Parking Authority Fund for fiscal year ended Dec. 31, 2015, shows that the parking meters cost $136,182 in “meter support,” which includes two full-time positions, Finance Director Jennifer Walker confirmed in a recent interview with Talk Business & Politics.

The parking deck is costing the city $31,740 in deck support and an additional $41,780.63, paid from the general fund, to accommodate one full-time parking attendant. While the revenues generated for the parking deck ($77,430) were large enough to cover the $73,520.63 overall expense, they likely would not have been had the deck required capital outlay. In 2015, the city budgeted $50,000 for just such a purpose.

On the parking meter side, revenue of $110,461 fell more than $25,000 short of covering expenses. If the city decided to eliminate meter and deck usage altogether, then it would no longer need to appropriate the $209,702.63, which is the sum total of meter/deck maintenance and salaries for the two meter technicians and parking attendant.

With shortages in the LOPFI police and fire pension funds, the costs of running the meters and deck – revenues excluded – are just north of 10% of the estimated $2 million annual shortfall.

While the city has not made any official moves to end paid parking, administration and department heads continue to look at belt-tightening measures, which began in 2015 and resulted in a 6.5% reduction in General Fund expenditures, or a $3.2 million drop.

There are two potential issues with not using parking meters and paid parking. The first is that doing so would effectively eliminate three full-time positions. The second – an issue raised by Acting City Administrator Jeff Dingman and Fort Smith Police Chief Kevin Lindsey – is that some businesses, such as restaurants, “depend on parking turnover” to keep their customers flowing.

When asked if there had been complaints from business owners as to the paid parking presence downtown, Dingman deferred to Lindsey, who said there hadn’t been any brought to his attention in several years. If paid parking did go away, Dingman said that there would have to be an alternative, and it, too, would cost money.

“There are a number of different ways to handle parking, but all of them have costs associated with them,” he said. “You always have to have people to help enforce. Even if you do it by a two-hour time limit, or hour time limit, you still have to have somebody go back and mark tires, and that becomes even more labor intensive than the meters, because with the meters you can stagger your staff in how they do enforcement so it’s not predictable. Somebody’s chalking tires, it becomes predictable.”

Besides, he added, “we already have meters in place.”

For the last several years, city government had little choice but to continue its paid parking program. The revenues were channeled toward Parking Facilities Revenue Construction Bonds issued in 1998 (which were refunding 1991 series bonds). However, these bonds were paid in full in 2014.

While Dingman and Lindsey showed resistance in removing paid parking from the downtown area, there will need to be some form of action taken soon as the programs are not paying for themselves, and the only way to ensure that they do so is a rate increase – something Lindsey said he hopes to explore.

It’s unclear whether he would have the votes from Fort Smith Board members, however. City Director Kevin Settle said the topic was broached at one of November’s budget meetings, “but the Board decided not to do it at that point, and I haven’t thought of it since then.”

“It’s one of those things that will probably come back to us, and we’ll have to decide which way to go,” he said.