What price non-resident parking in White Rock?
Not $1,200 per year, it appears.
At its April 15 meeting council received – but balked at approving – a corporate report from planning and development director Anne Berry recommending that amount as the annual rate for a year-round parking decal option for people who live outside the city.
Even Coun. Elaine Cheung, who had originally asked staff to look at a pilot decal parking program for non-resident users last June, acknowledged that the suggested price was too steep for casual visitors.
Nor did the fact that such a decal would only cover the waterfront and not Peace Arch Hospital and Centennial Park – there are other parking discount programs already covering those areas, Berry said – offer much appeal.
The last time White Rock attempted a non-resident parking decal was in 2012. At that time the decal applied to off-season parking only and was priced at $175. A total of 13 were sold, Berry said.
In the written report to council, prepared by parking services manager Ralph Volkens, it was noted that decal use could vary widely from user to user.
“We don’t know how much parking a non-resident decal-user might actually use,” Berry said, after commenting that setting the price was the most “challenging” part of staff’s work on the proposal.
The price was derived from the cost of two hours of waterfront parking, three times a week, she said.
Given that owners of private parking lots charge between $55 and $200 per month, $1,200 per year seemed comparable, the report concluded.
Were a decal to be used to its maximum potential – four hours per day, 365 days a year – the parking value would amount to some $5,610, Berry said.
However, it was also noted in the written report that selling decals, despite bringing initial revenue, could ultimately shrink the city’s overall parking take, reduce the availability of spaces, and would likely require “labour-intensive” monitoring and enforcement in pay parking lots.
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The report recommended that, with upgraded city technology, any decal program should be modified into a model that would link decal registration with the vehicle licence plate and require a user to ‘initiate’ a parking session through an app or a paystation. In that case, rather than having a physical decal, holders would receive a discount to the usual hourly rate for parking.
The issue was moot, anyway, since council members were only willing to receive the report for information.
Cheung said she recognized the difficulty for staff of differentiating between two different use scenarios: out-of-town decal buyers who might use the decal for parking while working at a Marine Drive business, and people who might use it occasionally while visiting restaurants on the strip.
“Knowing this, I don’t think anyone’s paying $1,200,” she said, adding that it would make sense to wait on offering any non-resident program until licence plate recognition is available to the city.
“I’m thinking maybe we need to upgrade our technology altogether and change our system.”