City extends paid parking hours and hikes citation fines to cover deficit

Visitors to downtown Sarasota and St. Armands Circle won’t be paying more to park in paid on-street and garage spaces, but hours will be extended and citation fees increased as the city’s Parking Division seeks to achieve operational solvency.

As an enterprise fund, the Parking Division, under the direction of General Manager Broxton Harvey, is intended to cover its own expenses with revenues generated. During their March 23 meeting, however, city commissioners were warned, unless changes are made, of upcoming annual deficits approaching and exceeding $2 million, largely because of impending capital expenses to replace aging equipment (see box) and lost revenues from past natural disasters. 

Opting not to increase hourly rates and monthly parking permit fees, the City Commission unanimously voted to extend hours of paid parking in city-owned spaces and to increase fines for citations, which combined are projected to generate more than $2.7 million in additional revenue.

That amount, should projections hold true, will cover anticipated deficits and allow the Parking Division to build a fund balance.

In addition to the capital expenses, Harvey cited a number of fiscal challenges facing the Parking Division budget. They include:

• A decrease in year-over-year revenues.
• Flooding of St. Armands impacting revenue.
• Postponed collection of parking fees following storms.
• Increased expenses due to equipment replacement costs.
• Increased vendor fees.
• Underutilized garages.
• Repayment of debt to the general fund.
• Possibility of assuming Bay Runner funding of $924,231 annually, currently funded by the city's Office of Economic Development.

“There are so many factors that come into play,” Planning Director Steven Cover told commissioners. “No one could expect the hurricane activity that we had late in 2024, Covid, and we had red tide one year. All these things have an impact on the revenues that the parking generates.”

Harvey presented multiple revenue-enhancing options for commissioners to consider, including increasing monthly employee parking permits, hiking hourly rates, extending the hours of paid parking from 8 a.m. to midnight on-street and 24 hours/seven days a week in all garages and surface lots, and increasing citation fines by $5 across all categories.

"We're looking at trying to get ourselves out of a hole and also staying out of a hole as well," Harvey said. "We are facing some operational challenges, and they mainly stem from the flooding of St. Armands in 2024 and, with that, there's been a decrease in revenues year over year. We had postponement of collection of parking fees at St. Armands for over three months. We did not collect for one month downtown, we did not write any citations during that time."

Commissioners summarily rejected any notion of increasing monthly employee parking permit fees and hourly rates. Harvey presented an option to raise all employee permits to $30 per month. 

“No, no, no to increasing the parking fee, and no to increasing the parking permit fees for the employees and the businesses,” said Jen Ahearn-Koch, who was joined in a chorus of unanimity among her fellow commissioners.

Currently, the monthly rates for employees and other designated users in downtown and St. Armands are:

• St. Armands garage and lots: $10.
• Downtown garages and lots: $20.
• Contractor parking in St. Armands and downtown: $50.
• St. Armands neighborhood resident permits: $10 (annually)
• Resident overnight garage permits: $100.

Parking fees across the board will remain as they are, ranging from $1 per hour on-street in the Judicial District and $1.50 per hour elsewhere, $1 per hour in city-owned surface lots and, $2 for the second hour and $1 for each additional hour in parking decks. 

There are also hundreds of free spaces of varying hourly restrictions throughout downtown.

"I was here when we first instituted the Parking Division because we were paying out of the general fund hundreds of thousands of dollars every year for parking," said Commissioner Liz Alpert. "What people don't realize is parking is not free. Somebody's paying it, so either the taxpayers throughout the city are paying it, or the users of the parking are paying it, so somebody has to pay for the parking."

Whether the changes to the parking program will result in enough revenue to pay for it remains to be determined.