The Newport City Commission discussed its thoughts on parking in the city and possible future plans during a meeting Monday.
The conversation was held around past parking programs, such as a city-issued sticker for residents and those who park in the city three or more times a week, and if that was of interest today. The effort is to prevent out-of-state plates from parking on city streets for long periods and ensure adequate residential parking in areas such as those surrounding the MegaCorp Pavilion.
The May 6 meeting was a caucus meeting and, therefore, only a discussion. No votes were taken.
“So, what I’m looking for with the parking is what is the feeling of the board?” Newport City Manager Tom Fromme said. “Should we work on a parking sticker program? Should we not? Should we have a paid sticker? Should we not? Should we have residential stickers that are free or not? And I can just say, though, the residential stickers are difficult.”
Fromme said years ago, Newport had city stickers that would go on the corner of a car’s windshield. The stickers were $12.50 and had to be renewed yearly for residents and those who parked on city streets three or more times a week. Fromme said he has always been an advocate for city stickers.
“We sold 10,000 stickers a year,” Fromme said. “The good thing about stickers was Ohio plates, out-of-state plates. At least we had a log of them because if ‘Joe Blow’ had an Ohio plate and he parked on a city street, he still had to have a city sticker.”
He said issuing the city sticker allowed Newport to collect revenue and keep track of the out-of-state plates.
“Once we did away with the stickers, we lost that control, and on top of that, we lost our single largest revenue stream from parking tickets,” Fromme said. “Parking city sticker tickets was our largest number of tickets per year.”
Fromme said the city spends roughly $400,000 yearly, give or take, on roads. He said they have spent $1 million on road repairs in some years. Newport receives approximately $300,000 from the state annually, which goes toward filling potholes and salt. Now, he said, the city is getting calls about repairing alleys that require brick replacements and are costly.
“Now, if people really want us to fix brick alleys and not just pave over them, they’re going to have to pay the price,” Fromme said. “If I could give the Fromme optimistic version and say an alleyway would cost $220,000. That’s a very high price to pay for a little 10-foot wide 12-foot-wide alley.”
The city stickers were a use tax, and the revenue was used for street repair.
Newport Commissioner Mike Radwanski asked how the sticker would work for out-of-town visitors. Fromme said it wasn’t an issue in the past. Police would ticket cars parked overnight, and if someone with an out-of-state plate was ticketed who was visiting, they could call traffic and get the ticket dismissed.
Newport Mayor Tom Guidugli Jr. said the city also used to have visitors passed that could be hung on the window.
Radwanski said the city’s parking plan must include electric vehicles. He said he had been approached by residents wanting to get an electric vehicle charging station in front of their house and asked how they could ensure other people wouldn’t park there.
“This is something that has never been discussed before on the board of commissioners, and I really hope that we start to think about whether it be a lot in the neighborhood where there are EV charging stations and people can take advantage of a program like that, or they themselves can I guess it would be something like pay a fee to have the right to have an EV charging station in front of their house that they can use,” Radwanski said.
Fromme said the city has discussed whether residents can lease a spot or have a neighborhood-wide charging spot.
Another issue Fromme brought up was residential parking. He said they designated residential parking years ago due to people coming to Newport on the Levee and parking in front of people’s houses. They’re seeing the same issue with things like MegaCorp Pavilion moving in.
He said residential stickers can be challenging because businesses also get them, but people will still call the police.
“These businesses pay taxes,” he said. “They’re located in this neighborhood. So, therefore, they’re residents. What’s not realistic is for the police department to get visitor passes to 100 members of a congregation for a church or all the customers of a dentist’s office.”
Newport Commissioner Beth Fennell said people might not want to stick stickers on their windows. Fromme said that with updated technology, they can use digital stickers.
Fromme said the program could be run externally, privately through the city, or through a parking commission.
“I’ve talked to some folks, and you know, I don’t think there’s as much resistance to this project as we think there might be out there, and people would be accepting of it as long as it went with some improvements,” Newport Commissioner Ken Rechtin said. “Street improvements, streetscapes and those types of things. I think it makes sense.”
Guidugli said the city needs to get business input and come up with a “why” for what it’s doing. Fromme said he would like input from each commissioner within the next month, and then they can have another caucus meeting to discuss it further.
