Paid parking to return downtown?
Business improvement association making request to city council
The downtown business improvement association wants city council’s approval to discontinue 90-minute free parking and to reinstate paid parking in the Queen Street district.
The request is due to “escalating costs,” reads a letter to city staff, dated Jan. 24 and signed by Downtown Board of Management chairman Ron Charbonneau.
A motion brought forward by board member Karen Stearne to discontinue 90-minute free parking was approved by the board at its Oct. 9 meeting.
“From discussions, we understand that new pay-and-display machines will be required to implement the paidparking criteria,” Charbonneau wrote in the letter.
Neither Charbonneau, nor Stearne, could be reached for comment.
The request is scheduled to go before council Tuesday evening. City staff recommends council refer the matter to them, so they can come back with a report.
Back in 2015, the BIA requested council support 90-minute free parking on Queen Street.
At the time, the BIA’s then general manager said such a move would be a “critical” step in the continued development of downtown and hopefully help attract more traffic and people to an area trying to revitalize itself.
Mayor Jim Diodati said he spoke with Charbonneau about the issue and was told free parking has taken thousands
of dollars out of the BIA and Community Improvement Plan budgets.
Diodati said he was told the benefits of free parking were minimal and were not enough to outweigh the lost revenue.
“There are two schools of thought on offering free parking,” said Diodati.
“The one school is if you give free parking, people are going to just take up the valuable parking spots in front of businesses and then customers aren’t going to be able to get good parking. The other school of thought is if you charge them, they might not come to the downtown because you can get free parking at the malls and the plazas and certain other restaurants within the city.”
Diodati said the BIA would “rather save their money and invest in resources to help tie in with the GO train and the business and opportunities that that’s going to bring.”