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The City Council is considering a temporary moratorium on the issuance of year-long residential parking permits until a comprehensive plan can be developed to better match the number of spaces to the number of permits issued.

“What we are (currently) selling is a hunting permit and there’s not necessarily enough spots associated with it.” said Councilman Joe Woerner at the council’s Monday night workshop meeting. “It’s a little bit of false advertising and we don’t have a way right now to regulate it.”

Under the moratorium, the city would instead issue 90-day parking permits for a $30 fee until it decides how to re-implement the one year residential parking permit or some other system of residential permits. The current price is $30 for the year-long permit.

Temporarily cutting the permit to 90 days would allow a quicker transition to any new plan, Woerner said. “The thinking was…this would at least be a step to prevent a continuation of a longer transition period,” he said.

The moratorium is among the recommendations of the city’s parking consultant Desman Associates whose parking study was made public last month. The New York-based firm was hired last year to assess the city’s parking needs.

Currently permits are issued by calendar year and there are only two permits allowed per residence, according to Deputy Mayor Amy Quinn.

Quinn said she would be opposed to a moratorium because each of the Desman Associates parking study recommendation require a number of calculated steps of implementation and worries that 90-days would not be enough time to put a comprehensive permit plan in place.

“We are not going to have the permits, which is one of the most complex issues, figured out in that period of time then you’ll need another resolution to extend it another 30 days and another,” she said. “I just think that coming to the (City) Council with recommendation and an implementation schedule of all of the major issues would be my recommendations.”

At its first meeting following the parking study release, parking committee members vetted whether or not the state owned Bangs Avenue parking garage would be a sufficient place to house residential parking permits in the downtown area.

Under a lease agreement with the state, the city currently offers free public parking from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. on Friday and Saturday at the Bangs Avenue parking garage.

Quinn said the residential parking permit fee will most likely increase.“If we are giving you a spot, a set spot, we are absolutely charging more for that,” Quinn said.

Both Quinn and Woerner are members of the parking committee.

“I’m not here to kill it [the proposed 90-day permit]…it’s a complicated issue that requires a tremendous amount of thinking, planning and strategizing,” she said.

Woerner said he’d rather have a parking plan in place within 90 days and if the parking committee has to meet twice a month instead of its regular monthly schedule he’d rather do that.

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