The Covington Business Council’s March Luncheon focused on explaining the recent changes to the city’s parking code to local business leaders. Covington city manager Ken Smith was the featured speaker.
The Covington Motor Vehicle Parking Authority was founded in 2018. The City Commission thought it was necessary the city had an entity solely focused on parking. The mission of the parking authority was to own, manage, acquire and incur debt to run the city’s revenue generating parking assets.
“Most of our streets were laid out before cars existed. Horses and buggies were on the streets when the city was designed,” Smith said. “We don’t have the parking that they do in the suburbs, but quite frankly, we don’t want the parking that they have in the suburbs. We do have to make do with what we have.”
Covington updated three of their ordinances related to parking at the Board of Commissioners legislative meeting on Tuesday.
“When we created the parking authority a few years ago, we realized we needed to go back and look at those ordinances and explicitly state the parking authority has this authority, and the city has this authority,” Smith said.
Covington has raised the rates on parking costs. The city hadn’t raised rates since 2015. They were $1.10 an hour, which was substantially below the market. The city raised the rate to $1.50 in order to stay competitive in response to rising expenses and inflation. The city needs the money to properly compensate the parking meter enforcement authority as well as modernizing parking enforcement technology, Smith said.
“We need pay stations, license plate readers, and all the technology that makes the enforcement possible because quite frankly, I can put all the parking meters out there I want, I can set whatever rate, whatever hours, but if no one is ever getting a ticket, it’s going to get around pretty quickly that you don’t really need to put any money in the meter,” Smith said. “We actually need to enforce it in order for it to be competitive.”
The city set new parking hour enforcement from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., Monday through Saturday.
“We don’t need people who aren’t patronizing our businesses to be camping out in those parking spots,” Smith said.
Monthly parking passes for public parking garages and lots are increasing $5.00 across the board. The most expensive monthly parking pass will now be $65.00. According to Smith, the city’s public parking garages are filling up. The River Center parking garage is nearing full capacity. The city has considered building another parking garage in the near future.
“As frustrating as it is for any expense to go up, we’re not making a profit on parking garages, we’re actually losing money,” Smith said. “The reality is we need more parking.”
The change take effect immediately, although there will be a grace period – i.e. “courtesy tickets” or warnings – as the public gets used to the new rules and the meters are recalibrated and relabeled. The city will be working with merchants near metered parking to find ways to educate their customers.
Kyle Snyder was hired by the city to be the full-time employee in charge of the Parking Authority. Snyder has a background in planning and development services within Kenton County.
“I hope to be a big part of driving this forward which will help drive economic growth and help everything work better,” Snyder said. “It’s a major thing everyone is thinking about. Hopefully I can do the job well to move the city forward.”
The city is working to update and implement new signage to direct people to parking garages around the city.
The city is not looking to increase parking ticket costs. Smith hopes the increased enforcement will discourage people from parking violations, thus decreasing the likelihood of more tickets for citizens.
The Parking Authority will also be in charge of enforcing residential parking zones. The city currently has one such zone in the Licking Riverside neighborhood. Other neighborhoods in Covington are experiencing issues with residential and business parking. As the city develops residential parking plans for other neighborhoods, the enforcement agency will be critical.
As businesses continue to grow, the city will look to put more parking meters in neighborhoods such as Main Strasse, which has a thriving business district, but no parking meters.
