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The City of Asbury Park is in search of a parking consultant.

After a presentation given by Leonard Bier, principal at Bier Associates, at Tuesday’s council meeting, members of city council voted unanimously to go out to bid in search of someone who will conduct a holistic study of the current parking situation in the city and make recommendations.

Bier has three decades’ worth of experience as a parking consultant working in Rahway, Newark, New Brunswick, Hackensack, Camden, and Somerville, he said. He’s also an attorney with offices in New Brunswick and a Rutgers Law School graduate and co-authored the state funded parking study “Parking Matters: Designing, operating, and financing structured parking in Smart Growth Communities.”

Bier outlined the difference between parking resources — meters, meter readers, public works and police departments, etc. — and a parking system, a more comprehensive arrangement of those resources that prioritizes the efficiency and effectiveness of each unit, to the city council.

Asbury Park has a parking utility, a partially independent body that takes care of revenue and collection. In order for the utility to maximize its assets, a parking system should be put into place, according to Bier.

Seasonal rates and other issues are part of what needs to be looked at and discussed, he said, so the city can find “how best to leverage that and bring it back to further the development of the city.”

Parking has been a hot topic of discussion during the public participation portion of the regular session council meetings for the past few weeks. The Tuesday meeting was no different.

Steven Statland, owner of Chop Chop Bang Bang, voiced frustrations with residents in the area who have permits to park in zoned spaces along Lake Avenue but choose to park in the spots near his store because “they are too lazy to walk” and no one seems to be ticketing them.

Pat Schiavino, artist and owner of Gallery629, said he has had people travel to Asbury Park from New York for events only to turn back around and leave because they couldn’t find parking.

“It’s an ongoing problem,” he said.

Downtown business owners fear the addition of several new restaurants will only cause more frustrations to visitors and residents who have, in the past, already had difficulty finding parking over the busy summer months.

Before Bier or anyone else can conduct a study and make any recommendations to the utility they will have to submit a bid for the contract, as the city is required by the state to conduct a fair and open bid process according to its arrangement to accept transitional aid funds through the state, according to City Attorney Frederick Raffetto.

City resident Anita Weiner said she was “glad to see the parking situation” being addressed and hoped the process to hire a parking consultant and begin the work would not take as long as the recent efforts to hire a new city manager or redesign the city’s website.

“I agree let’s not make it like the website,” said Councilman John Moor.

The funding source for the bid process will come out of the city’s parking utility, Raffetto said.

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