Downtown parking debate goes on, shadowed by economy

City government wants its parking department to pay for itself. Businesses in downtown Sarasota and St. Armands want convenient parking for their customers, ideally free. Merchants want turnover in street parking spaces to accommodate more customers throughout the day, and underutilized parking decks, which already don’t cover their own costs, are saddled with elevators in need of frequent repairs and expensive replacement.

While the city struggles to find a solution, caught in the middle are the restaurants, merchants and businesses that insist any changes in the parking program that cost more for their customers and extend hours of enforcement makes downtown appear unwelcoming, chasing customers to locations offering acres of free parking such as University Town Center.

Some 20 members of the public, mostly downtown businesses and commercial property owners, addressed the City Commission on Aug. 3. Their pleas to suspend parking enforcement changes that went into effect on July 1 were approved until another solution to the division’s budgetary woes can be found.

But as commissioners stated in the past, somebody will have to pay for parking. Be it a user fee, parking district fee, a permit program or spread across the general fund tax base, there are parking deck bonds and maintenance costs to cover in addition to personnel and equipment expenses. As an enterprise fund, the Parking Division is intended to be self-sufficient. The prior changes were made to achieve just that.

Toss into the mix uncertainty about potential property tax revenue reduction should Florida's Amendment 3 referendum be approved in November and parking becomes a jigsaw puzzle with ill-fitting pieces.

To that end, the city scheduled a community meeting at 5:30 p.m. on Aug. 24 and a commission workshop at 9 a.m. Aug. 31 to further explore solutions. Both meetings are at City Hall.

“This aggressive ticketing does not make downtown more friendly or welcoming,” Kirk Voelker, a downtown commercial property owner, told commissioners. "The parking department is not the bad guy. They're doing exactly what an enterprise system does. They're coming up with a budget and finding creative ways to pay for it. Unfortunately, those ways to pay for it are on the backs of our customers, and simply looking at it and saying, ‘Well, we'll just transfer that cost to the small business owners and restaurants,’ is not a solution.”

A solution will be sought, though, as the Parking Division budget has swelled from $3.75 million in fiscal year 2025 to $6.7 million requested for FY 2027. That's in no small part due to elevator replacements, which cost about $750,000 each. Meeting those costs requires revenue, which the additional paid parking enforcement hours were expected to deliver.

Bigger than only parking?

At the Aug. 3 meeting, speaker after speaker told of businesses laying off employees or shutting their doors because of the impact of the month-long parking changes. 

“My business is down 40% to last year's numbers. I have cut my employees' hours. Each one is working one day a week, and they were working four and five,” said Darci Jacob, owner of Darci boutique on Main Street. “This summer is almost as bad as April and May 2020.”

Photo by Andrew Warfield

SRQ Med Spa owner Katherine Hermes told commissioners she laid off an employee at the end of July, her business down because customers who previously arrived prior to parking enforcement hours stopped when they were extended by two hours to 8 a.m. 

Instead, many speakers said, their customers are heading out to UTC where parking is plentiful and free.

Or is it?

Resident John Mercer, a former mayor of Sunnyvale, California, offered a different perspective. 

“People talk about UTC; all that free parking out there, and how attractive it is, and they're absolutely right," he said. "Except that's not really free parking." 

It's not free, he said, because the merchants pay for the parking in their rent, costs either absorbed or passed on to the customers.

Any downtown parking strategy, he said, should include a parking district paid for by the businesses, who have the option to include the expense in their pricing.

“I have some experience with that as a mayor of a city in California that had a parking district with lots of free parking downtown,” Mercer said. “It’s great. It could be part of a hybrid system of mixing what you have with something like that.”

More than just parking, City Manager Karie Friling and Planning Director Steven Cover suggested other factors are contributing to the downtown business woes.

“The economy is struggling. When you're paying $4 a gallon for gas, you have less disposable income to spend elsewhere,” Friling said. “We’ve gone out and visited this supposedly wonderful place off of I-75, which I believe is nothing compared to the city of Sarasota, and they're down in business as well. I'm not discounting that our businesses are saying that they are struggling, but I don't think it's fair to blame parking for all the struggles, either.”

The Associated Press reports shoppers earning more than $100,000 per year increasingly frequent discount retailers and cut back on dining out when gas prices are high. The average price of a regular gallon of gas in Florida was $3.90 on Tuesday, according to AAA, about 87 cents higher than the same time last year. 

“This is not the greatest economy right now for businesses whether it's restaurant, retail or whatever,” Cover said. “Gas prices have a significant impact on business. I've talked to a couple of servers and they said business was really good up until spring break, and then it dropped off.” 

That is shortly after military action in the Middle East began, causing fuel prices to spike.

If perception is indeed nine-tenths reality, though, any impression that downtown is unwelcoming, inconvenient and expensive could be perceived as adding to the gas-fueled doldrums.

“The people have spoken, and we've heard them,” Commissioner Kyle Battie said. “It’s important that that we build that path of listening to the residents and the merchants of our downtown and St. Armands Circle, and we have to seriously understand that we are in competition with UTC. It's as simple as that.”