Parking permits go on sale Monday
Frequent users of Kingston’s municipal parking lots will be able to purchase permits for their use beginning Monday, the city’s director of communications and community engagement said.
Megan Weiss-Rowe said the $10 permits would be available for purchase online and by mail through the city.
The permits are part of the city’s plan to begin charging users of the municipal parking lots, which currently are free. Under that plan, parking payment kiosks will be installed in a majority of the city’s lots, after which users will be charged 75 cents per hour to park.
The permits would allow frequent users of the lots to park through the end of the year without having to pay the hourly rate.
“The kiosks are expected to be installed at each site in the next week,” Weiss-Rowe said in an email on Wednesday. “There will be a few weeks before they officially go ‘live’ in order to sync the software with ours and to give frequent users advanced time to purchase their permits. We anticipate the kiosks will be in use by early September.”
Weiss-Rowe said the city would issue an official press release once the dates have been firmed up.
The kiosks are expected to be installed in six of the city’s municipal lots — three in the Uptown business district; on Cornell and Prince streets in Midtown; and on Dock Street in the Rondout area.
Three city lots will not be getting kiosks and will remain free to use — the ones next to Sea Deli and Arace Electronics on Broadway in Midtown, and the one at the Trolley Museum of New York in the Rondout district.
In the meantime, three forums will be held in the coming weeks to address parking issues in the city.
The forums begin at 6 p.m. and the first will be held Aug. 30 at the LGBTQ Center, 300 Wall St. The second will be Aug. 31 at City Hall, 420 Broadway, while the third will be Sept. 6 at the Hudson River Maritime Museum, 50 Rondout Landing.
The Common Council voted in early March to have the city borrow $125,000 to purchase the parking payment kiosks, despite push back from community members who criticized the decision to charge for use of the municipal lots.
The kiosks follow on the recent increase in cost for on-street metered parking from 50-cents an hour to $1, as well as the launch of the new Whoosh! mobile app allowing users to pay using their smartphones. The app charges a 35-cent convenience fee per transaction, which is not paid to the city.
The city’s 2017 budget anticipated $175,000 in revenue from parking fees, but that was based on the kiosks being purchased and installed by April 1 and on-street meter rates being increased at the same time. Of the revenue, $100,000 was earmarked just for maintenance of the city’s municipal lots.