After months of debate on how to implement paid parking in and around downtown, Wichita's City Council decided late Tuesday night to delay the decision again.
In August, city staff announced plans to convert much of downtown to paid parking by January 2025. Community backlash led the City Council to delay the project and request more options for a future parking plan from city staff.
On Tuesday, staff presented five potential parking plans, and the council voted on two. But neither could muster the four votes necessary to pass.
The City Council will revisit the issue on Dec. 10, when staff is supposed to come back with a new parking plan option.
“We just have to get to four (votes),” said council member Dalton Glasscock. “So, I know staff will take that into consideration.”
The city is seeking paid parking because of the expense of maintaining infrastructure like parking lots and garages, said assistant city manager Troy Anderson. The city estimates each parking spot costs $400 a year to maintain, but the current system brings in just $227 a year per parking space.
“What we’re doing now isn’t working. We continue to see our assets decline,” Anderson said. “And we continue to sort of fail at managing parking.”
But City Manager Robert Layton also said in Tuesday’s meeting that revenue from a new paid parking system could be used to help build a new 500-space parking garage for a massive biomedical campus coming to downtown. The campus is a collaboration between Wichita State University, WSU Tech and the University of Kansas.
The garage could be affected if the council chose a parking plan that didn’t raise sufficient revenue, Layton said.
“If the council decides not to go in that direction, we have to revisit what the commitments are to WSU,” Layton said. “There’s no number we’ve committed to formally with WSU.”
Some community members said they had not known parking revenue would pay for a new parking garage.
“It seems like this parking plan is intended to pay for that – at the detriment of small business owners,” said Dan Norton, the owner of Norton’s Brewing Company, which is located downtown.
The five parking plans staff presented Tuesday include:
- Option A, in which all of downtown and Delano would be charged a flat rate of $0.75 cents/hour for parking
- Option B, which is similar to A except everyone would receive the first hour of parking free
- Option C, which is similar to A except it would exempt Old Town from paid parking
- Option D, which would maintain the status quo
- Option E, which would exempt Old Town and Delano from paid parking and increase parking rates to $3 an hour
Option A is the only plan that raises sufficient dollars to cover operations, maintenance and capital expenses for parking needs, Anderson said. Option A is also the plan that could make dollars available to pay for the parking garage for the Biomedical campus.
Option A garnered yes votes from council members Becky Tuttle, Brandon Johnson and Maggie Ballard. Johnson said he supported it because it “puts the city of Wichita in the best financial position to manage parking.”
Glasscock said he wouldn’t vote for any parking plan that included the Delano district west of the Arkansas River.
“I think there’s a tell that we’re making money in Delano, and that we’re trying to use that to cover some of the cost in downtown and Old Town,” Glasscock said.
Glasscock supported option E, which would eliminate Delano from the plan. But only one other council member, J.V. Johnston, voted in favor of it.
Mayor Lily Wu said the parking rates in option E were too high.
“I don’t believe $3 an hour is reasonable for on-street parking,” Wu said.
In general, Wu lambasted the city’s historical failure to maintain its parking infrastructure, which has $18 million in deferred maintenance. She was frustrated by the city’s lack of enforcement for its current parking system, and she asked why the city hadn’t raised the prices on existing meters for years.
“Why has the city not prioritized operations and maintenance of the parking system over the past 15 years, and why has it not adjusted prices to achieve cost-recovery?” Wu said.
Only about 500 of the city’s 6,000 public parking spaces downtown are currently metered, according to the city’s Parking and Multimodal Plan. Meters currently charge a median of 20 cents an hour.
Layton, the city manager, responded that staff has raised concerns with the City Council since 2009, but most administrations continued to prioritize free parking for the public.
Council members asked city staff to bring a new parking plan option forward in December, combining parts of Option A and Option E.
