Bethany Beach officials have toyed for years with the idea of replacing some or all of the town’s 1,038 parking meters with pay stations, as nearby Rehoboth Beach did two years ago under Main Street renovations.
With significant start-up costs of about $1,500 per station, the idea was nixed in previous budget discussions. Budget committee and town council members have kept an eye on the town’s bottom line as real estate transfer taxes continue to lag prior years’ levels and with a property tax hike recommended and eventually adopted this spring.
However, financial analysis indicates the switch to pay stations could eventually benefit the town’s bottom line, by eliminating carry-over time left over from previous customers, encouraging more spending on parking by accepting credit card and paper money transactions, and reducing theft and meter maintenance costs.
Despite that promise, council members at their Nov. 8 meeting indicated a consensus against moving to pay stations, primarily citing citizen confusion likely to happen during the transition and blockades to the town eventually removing all meters in favor of the pay stations.
“Rehoboth Beach has been hearing a lot of citizen dissatisfaction,” Mayor Carol Olmstead noted of that town’s pay-by-space system, which initially utilized one pay station for every five spaces and has suffered from motorists failing to correctly note or forgetting their assigned space number when paying at the pay station. (The Rehoboth Beach system also does not accept credit cards or paper bills.)
Such problems — including an estimated cost of $25 per year per space to ensure parking spaces are clearly marked for the system — discouraged council members from giving the pay-by-space system serious consideration during a presentation on pay stations from Parking Supervisor Bill Dowdell last Thursday.
“Pay-by-space would be a horror,” Olmstead commented. Dowdell said pay-by-space could, however reduce enforcement problems, since pay stations could report apparent violations to a central system or to on-site officers with the swipe of a card.
Council members indicated more openness to a pay-and-display pay-station system that utilizes paper parking tickets issued when motorists put their money into a pay station.
One part of the ticket would have to be returned to the vehicle for display for parking enforcement officers — an inconvenience cited for the pay-and-display system, since Bethany Beach pay stations would be located in central locations and potentially serve 50 spaces or more each.
On the plus side for motorists, the pay-and-display system could be used to allow continued parking throughout the day, even if a vehicle was moved after its initial parking and pay-station payment. As proposed, the paper ticket on display would guarantee legal parking at any non-permit spot in the town, except blue-colored meters along Garfield Parkway, until time was expired.
Dowdell noted that enforcement officers would have to make closer scrutiny to determine violations with the pay-and-display system, with time limits on the tickets in type only as large as 48 points, instead of by meter violation marks that can be read from the far end of the car now or by the pay-by-space system’s automation.
Pay stations pay off on bottom line
Still, Dowdell’s initial proposal for pay stations — a proposal, and not a recommendation, he emphasized — was for nine pay-and-display pay stations, to be located at the Campbell Place and Central Boulevard street-end beachfront lots, Ocean View Parkway, First Street, Second/Third streets, Hollywood Street, Parkwood Street, Wellington Parkway and Oakwood Street. The total cost would be about $150,000.
“We would focus on the beach lots,” Dowdell said. “I think that’s the best place to start.” With an estimated 490 meters in those areas, the town would only have to maintain about 550 remaining meters, at an annual cost of $72 each per year.
Dowdell predicted a conservatively estimated 7 percent increase in revenue from the presence of the nine pay stations, thanks to the increased variety of payment methods that could be offered and the elimination of free carry-over time. (Estimates provided by the manufacturer predicted up to a 20 percent revenue increase, while Ocean City, Md., has seen closer to a 14 percent actual increase in the first two years of townwide pay station operations.)
With that 7 percent revenue increase in mind (beyond this year’s parking fee and fine rate hike), Dowdell’s proposal would still cost the town $57,175 in the first year. It would pay for itself and bring the town estimated additional revenue of $65,000 in the second year. By the end of the estimate period in 2015, the town would have brought in $412,835 in revenue above the nine-station system’s costs. Refurbishing and upgrade of the remaining 550 meters would run about $168,000.
Town Manager Cliff Graviet noted that the cost of replacing the pay stations at the end of that period should be factored into that bottom line, too, reducing the final payoff by 2015 to about $260,000.
The pay stations also provide a potential benefit in providing space on their LCD screens for public information, either in the form of paid advertisements from local businesses or with public announcements of lost children or beach closures, for example.
Aging meters pose
other challenges
The alternative — maintaining an aging system of more than a thousand parking meters and replacing obsolete or broken meters — would cost the town some $268,750 through 2015, running annually at costs between $58,400 and $16,250 for the town in each of those years.
The $72-per-meter cost would cover the replacement of sand- and salt-weathered plastic windows, repair or replacement of locks, replacement of gaskets and repainting of the exterior vaults, which Dowdell said could last nearly forever. Broken internal meter parts would also need to be repaired or replaced on a case-by-case basis.
Dowdell said the aging meters are not generally subject to failure of their timing mechanism and thus are not costing meter users their coins as they break down, despite the skepticism of some motorists. Instead, he said, most simply stop working. While older meters are more subject to “miscues” — problems with inserted coins not registering — he said there is no predicting when or why that kind of error happens.
Instead, Dowdell said enforcement officers had found their biggest regular headache from meters was being slowed significantly in their rounds by the locks on the coin storage bins in the meters, which are not quick to open — and reasonably so.
Dowdell said 2007 was the first summer season the town had had with no thefts of coins from meters, as keys for such systems proliferate through the Internet. Perhaps ironically, he postulated the drop in theft was largely due to the move to pay stations in both Ocean City and Rehoboth Beach. The enhanced security of the systems, he said, made the entire Delmarva shore less attractive to would-be thieves coming from the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore metro areas.
Also troubling the town’s aging meter supply is obsolescence, as the town learned this spring when trying to convert older meters over to the new parking fee rates. Their programming device simply didn’t have the software to reprogram some 300 of the oldest meters.
That problem was eventually overcome, with some of the 11-year-old meters sent back to the manufacturer for individual reprogramming. But those 300 meters are now targeted for replacement, particularly as a lack of spare parts also begins to take its toll.
Another 800 meters, each between seven and 10 years old now, are estimated to have only five years of life in full-time use. With their removal to storage when not in use during the summer, those meters roughly reach their predicted full lifespan, Dowdell said, with many now starting to reach the end of their useful life.
Costs of removing the meters for storage at the end of the season run about $3,000 for the town, with about five days of manpower from seasonal employees being used each year. Manpower costs are expected to be less with the pay stations, which would be covered and have their internal mechanisms removed to safe storage nine months of the year.
Plainly, on the basis of cost alone, Dowdell said of conversion to pay stations, “It looks like a no-brainer.”
A question of philosophy
Dowdell said, however, that his greatest concerns about the potential move to pay stations was not enforcement or manpower issues but rather the confusion it would generate in the public and the education that would have to be done to limit that confusion.
“People just walk away from their car without paying. They don’t see the meter, and the parking spot’s identification is at street level,” he pointed out, saying exactly that kind of problem had been noted in Rehoboth Beach.
Also a prospective problem is the potential of lines forming at the pay stations if multiple motorists pull up to nearby locations or need to pay for additional minutes at the same time.
“People will get very irate if we’re writing a ticket while they’re standing in line,” Dowdell said. “They do that now when they’re in line to get change and we’re writing a ticket.”
“Lines would create conflict,” he added.
Graviet posed the issue to the council on Nov. 8 as purely one of philosophy.
“Do you want pay stations?” he asked them. “Do you want to embrace pay stations instead of meters?”
Graviet acknowledged that the changeover to pay stations was likely to pose problems for the town.
“Some of them won’t know where to go or what to do,” he said. “This will be a real sea change, especially in some of the larger parking lots.”
Council Member Bob Parsons said he believed the town would have to have a real education plan in for town visitors and residents if pay stations were installed.
“If your education plan is to go through the Realtors and put information in their welcome packs, that isn’t an education plan,” he said, warning that much of the information given to renters by Realtors is never even read.
And Graviet warned them that they — and he — will likely be the ones to see fallout if the change is made.
“People will take this up with you all and with my office, so you have to make a decision,” Graviet said, noting a need to move forward with pay stations by January if they are to be installed in time for the 2008 summer season and to prepare for meter maintenance costs in spring’s planning for the 2009 fiscal year.
“Do you want to embrace change … or are you happy with how things are?” Graviet asked the council.
Garfield Parkway
would keep its meters
Just as troubling to council members on Thursday was the one major area in which the potential shift to parking meters would have little or no impact: the aesthetics and practicalities of downtown Bethany Beach and Garfield Parkway.
“I don’t think we can justify doing the whole town,” Dowdell said, pointing specifically to the town’s main entryway on Garfield Parkway, where parking meters now limit visitors to two hours of time before they have to return to feed their meters.
“In my wildest dreams, I could never see pay stations on Garfield. We couldn’t put in enough of them,” he added.
Dowdell said many who park along Garfield are there for 20 minutes or less. Some are leery of paying for a meter at all, with expectations to remain for a minute or two, if they’re lucky in being able to buy a newspaper quickly, he said. Those people, he theorized, won’t want to walk to a central pay station and then return to their car with a ticket, just to do a one-minute errand.
Council Member Steve Wode noted that he’d also prefer keeping the spots on Garfield for those people making short trips, as they shop or dine quickly in the town’s downtown shopping area. He said those going to the beach simply shouldn’t be parking there.
“I want the two-hour meters restricted to two hours,” Wode said.
Dowdell said he would recommend retaining parking meters on Garfield Parkway for that reason — something that he indicated would undermine a potential townwide shift to pay stations. “This would be a partial attempt to do something that I don’t think we can or want to do.”
And the poles housing the meters elsewhere would be unlikely to go away either, he said.
“We wouldn’t take down the poles. They’d be required for enforcement officers to identify the spaces,” Dowdell noted.
“Then why replace them anywhere?” Olmstead asked, citing as key the desire for pay stations to help in downtown beautification efforts by removing one of the most unsightly aspects of the area — the parking meters and their poles.
Even if the council were to accept the ongoing presence of meters on Garfield Parkway, the variation between those two-hour prime spots near the boardwalk, bandstand, shops and restaurants and those along Campbell Place with eight-hour meters could add to confusion if pay stations are implemented, Dowdell said.
“Will they try to put a ticket on a car in a blue-metered space?” he asked.
Graviet said the town would have to pass an ordinance prohibiting the use of pay station tickets at blue meters, in addition to clearly labeling the tickets as not for use at those locations, if pay stations were instituted.
But council members indicated that notion may never see the light of day.
“I think what we have works very nicely,” said Vice-Mayor Tony McClenny. “I think we ought to stay with what we have.”
“This is one of the few things we spend money on that we get a return on at a fairly reasonable cost,” Council Member Jerry Dorfman noted, pointing to the $72 annual refurbishment cost of the meters. He added that with the increase in revenue from fee and fine hikes in 2007, “I don’t think we need to do anything else. There’s enough confusion now.”
“I don’t see a whole lot of advantages,” Parsons added.
Council Members Joseph Healy and Tracy Mulligan expressed some willingness to consider the idea further in the future — particularly with further public or committee input — but neither endorsed a move to pay stations in the coming year.
“It might be a good idea to wait until we can do it throughout the whole town,” Olmstead concluded.