Featured photo: Downtown Winston-Salem (photo by Gale Melcher)

In most parts of downtown Winston-Salem, drivers can slide into a parking spot, slip two quarters into the rusty old meter and spend two hours frolicking downtown, and maybe even a bit longer, because sometimes the enforcement officer is too busy patrolling other sections of downtown.

But it won’t be that way for much longer.

In the coming months, the city will work to find a new vendor and increase its parking rates.

Currently, on-street parking costs between 25-50 cents depending on the location, while off-street garages and lots cost $1 per hour and up to $9 per day.

Between on-street and off-street parking, the city currently has 2,500 spaces managed by three parking enforcement officers.

But because the city’s fees are “much lower than any municipality in the area,” the city’s Transportation Operations Manager Reid Hutchins said that the city will be raising its rates soon.

“If you look at other municipalities comparable to our size, they’re all in the $1-$1.50 range,” Hutchins said, adding that staff will be “coming back” to city leaders for a “proposed rate hike.” 

The city also wants to get rid of the old coin meters, or see if they can be “retrofitted to allow for card access.”

The plans started back in November 2023, when Hutchins presented city leaders with a proposition — partnering with a third-party parking vendor. He explained that it’s “beneficial to partner with a vendor,” noting that surrounding municipalities such as Greensboro, Charlotte, Raleigh, Asheville and Wilmington partner with third-party companies to enforce pay-to-park rules. 

According to the city’s RFP documents, they are “interested in an initial one-year contract” with a vendor who can manage both on-street parking and off-street parking such as their parking decks, as well as implementation of new equipment such as gate arms.

At the end of January, the city released a request for proposals, which closed at the end of February.

The city wants help with parking appeal support, which is one of their biggest challenges, Hutchins said in November.

“Our current enforcement officers spend about an hour of each workday dealing with appeals from citizens,” Hutchins said. “If we could outsource that program, that would be a huge benefit. It would get our enforcement officers on the street more and allow them to write more tickets,” he added.

Hutchins added that since November, the city hired their third enforcement officer to assist in monitoring a portion of downtown that they were “not able to patrol adequately.”

“We are seeing that with the addition of this staff person we are able to assist parkers and enforce parking regulations in a greater capacity,” Hutchins wrote.

This change is one example of the city’s desire to outsource work to other companies. This month, RATP Dev became the city’s new bus operator, after years of the city putting thousands of dollars and work hours into things like operating contracts, insurance and claims, payroll, fuel, facilities and bus procurement.

“Just the staff time to facilitate that alone is tremendous,” said city’s Transportation Director Jeffrey Fansler, adding that working with a company like RATP Dev “shifts a lot of responsibility” over to them.

The move to change to a third-party vendor and increased rates also comes from years of decreasing parking revenue.

During the 2012-13 fiscal year, the city gleaned $216,594 from hourly parking meters, $1.03 million from their monthly parking lots and $92,103 from pay stations. That number dropped the next fiscal year between 2013-14: $179,550, $938,549 and $91,382 respectively from those same sources.

One more thing that may change is the parking rate enforcement time, according to the city.

Right now, the typical enforcement period is 8 a.m.-5 p.m.

“If we want to go 8-10, or 8-midnight or something along those lines, once we get a little further in that’s what we’re looking to possibly do,” Hutchins said. 

In an email, Hutchins stated that while the city is “not ready to roll this new platform out quite yet,” they are “working diligently” to make the transition “as seamless as possible.”

“We expect this to move forward in the coming months,” Hutchins wrote.

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