Meters coming to city park

Quarter of Memorial green space’s spots soon will cost visitors

A quarter of the parking spaces at Memorial Park will be metered starting later this year, a change coming as the city and the park’s nonprofit operators scrape together dollars for maintenance amid an ambitious renovation of the popular green space just west of downtown.

Visitors who park near the golf clubhouse, the tennis center, the gymnasium and pool, and the new parking lots being completed near the renovated Eastern Glades area will have to pay $1 per three hours of parking.

The Memorial Park Conservancy expects the new meters to net $135,000 in the fiscal year that starts July 1, rising to $375,000 annually in about four years; both figures account for paying off the up-front cost of the meters.

Shellye Arnold, president of the nonprofit Memorial Park Conservancy that took over the park’s operations three years ago and began fundraising to implement a new master plan, said declining funding for public spaces has made paid parking a key revenue source for parks across the country. It costs about $2 million a year to run Memorial Park, she said.

“There are two realities that make Memorial Park different than most other parks in Houston in regard to the needs of care and maintenance,” she said. “One is its sheer size; at 1,500 acres, it’s nearly twice the size of (New York’s) Central Park. Also, what we heard in the master planning was that Houstonians don’t want to commercialize this park. When you do that, it limits your ability to collect concessions and revenues to operate.”

‘The park needs it’

In all, 572 of the nearly 2,250 spaces at the park will be metered. About 60 percent of the parking spots north of Memorial Drive will remain free; all the spots south of it will.

Antonio Wizar parked his pickup truck at the tennis center during the Friday lunch hour, ready to swap his shirt and purple tie for jogging clothes, as he does most days. Wizar said no one complains about paying 75 cents to shower in the locker room after a run, and said he will not mind paying $1 when he visits, either.

“As much as I want to say that I’m against it, I’m going to have to agree because the park needs it,” he said. “We love this park, but none of us leaves any sort of money around here to help.”

Cameron Bell, walking on the park’s 2.9-mile Seymour Lieberman trail with water bottles strapped to her belt, had similarly mixed feelings. She tends to park along the jogging trail — those spots will stay free — in part because she has witnessed car burglaries in some of the lots that would get meters, and said security will need to increase when paid parking begins.

Arnold said the conservancy has worked with Houston Police Department to increase patrols in the area and is building a volunteer group to keep eyes on more areas of the park.

“It’s kind of a bummer. You don’t really want to have to pay to come to the park,” Bell said. “But we live off of the Buffalo Bayou Park, and they have meters over there, too. I know they’re doing all these renovations, so it makes sense to cover their costs somewhere.”

Renovation funding

The park’s $205 million renovation — $125 million of which will come from private donors, with $50 million coming from the city’s Uptown Redevelopment Authority and $30 million being sought from federal grants — is progressing, with work in the Eastern Glades area expected to wrap up this year.

Houston City Council first authorized the idea of metering parking in the park in 2015, when it passed an agreement affirming the new master plan and putting the conservancy in charge of implementing it; that agreement also committed the city to $400,000 in annual maintenance costs.

In updating the agreement this spring — after Rich and Nancy Kinder donated $70 million to the conservancy’s master plan capital campaign — the city’s maintenance contribution was replaced with the new parking fees, golf revenues and other funds. The city’s maintenance dollars instead will go to replace playground equipment in neighborhood parks.

Councilman Mike Knox voted in favor of the updated agreement but said he would have preferred to see the parking fees applied in a way that did not essentially place golfers, tennis players and swimmers in one camp and runners and cyclists in another.

“The parking should either be all free or all paid, one or the other. To separate the park-goers into these two groups seems unfair,” Knox said Friday. “But in the long run, we’re going to get a $205 million renovation of the park; it’s going to be much nicer — more of the park will be accessible to the citizens of Houston. In the end, it will be a good thing.”

Maintaining Memorial

Councilwoman Ellen Cohen, whose district includes the park, said the meter plan is reasonable and will not affect three-quarters of the parking spaces.

“I understand people not wanting to have to pay to park, but the fact of the matter is people love Memorial Park and it needs to be maintained,” she said. “This is one way to do that.”

The meters are expected to be installed later this summer and will be compatible with the Park Houston mobile phone app.