NIAGARA FALLS — A paid consultant has encouraged city officials to consider forming a new in-house parking division and hiring a professional parking management company to oversee the old Rainbow Centre ramp and surface lots downtown.

Representatives from Desman Associates, a company hired last year to formulate a comprehensive plan for downtown parking, believes both moves, along with an investment in new paid-parking equipment, would begin to produce substantial financial gains for the city.  

During a recent overview for city lawmakers, Desman representative Gregory Shumate said his company’s research dispelled a widely held misconception that there is not enough parking available in the downtown area. Rather, he said, the system as it currently stands allows too many potential customers to park for free, preventing the city from earning as much revenue as it should, especially during the peak months of the tourism season.

“The system is ill-managed,” Shumate said. “There’s a huge, seasonal demand that occurs and surges during the summer months. In our view, the city is really not doing the best possible to manage that demand and capitalize on the opportunity to capture revenues and provide order to downtown parking.”

Desman believes the city should form a parking division, with a paid, full-time parking manager position added to the payroll at a salary in the $45,000 to $50,000 range. The company also encouraged the city to establish a Downtown Parking Committee that would serve in an advisory role to the parking division and consist of key city officials, including the city administrator, police superintendent, director of public works and the parking manager.

“We are really only talking about a qualified parking manager with a minimal amount of support staff,” Shumate said. “They would assume the municipal accountability for all facets of the program.”

The Rainbow ramp and three other large surface lots that are owned by the city would be managed by a professional parking company under Desman’s proposal. The company would be responsible for staffing and maintaining all four sites as well as collecting parking revenue. Ideally, Shumate said, the private company would perform the bulk of the work with the city’s parking manager and parking division overseeing revenue collection and the overall quality of the job being done. The management company could be hired for an annual management fee, a base fee plus incentives or a simple percentage of the parking revenue take, Shumate said.

Desman also recommends the city enlist the help of a “civilian” staff to step up enforcement of parking rules, including two-hour parking limits. He said a few attendants would probably be able to do the job adequately.

“Without consistent and constant enforcement there’s a lot of non-compliant parking that can be found,” Shumate said. “We found, in our survey, a great deal of users are parking in violation. In other words, well beyond the two-hour limit.”

Desman believes the city should upgrade its parking access and revenue control systems, including the equipment that controls revenue at the ramp and at the surface lots. The company believes the city should install new “pay-n-display” parking meters at its Third Street and Rainbow Boulevard lots and along sections of key roads in the downtown area, including First, Second, Third, Main, Niagara, Old Falls streets, Buffalo Avenue and Rainbow Boulevard. The meters would offer users the option to pay with credit cards, a potentially lucrative method of payment the city currently cannot accommodate, according to Shumate. The entire proposed parking system would be monitored from a central control center inside the Rainbow ramp.

“The on-street meters will drive small-term parkers into the parking lots where you have an abundance of spaces,” Shumate said. “Right now, people tend to avoid using these parking lots. You want long-term parkers to use the parking garages and short-term parkers to be on the street.”

Full implementation would cost $907,000, including $79,462 for the new parking division and meter collection and enforcement staff. Desman estimates the entire package of changes would produce a net annual gain of $154,330, allowing the improvements to pay for themselves in about six years. In 2012, the ramp, lot and meter parking systems would produce a net operating income of $202,837, according to the company’s projections.

Council members questioned the need to add a parking manager to the city’s payroll and expressed concern about the role a private parking management company would have in collecting and handling parking revenues.

Desman representative Shaazad Asghar suggested the arrangement would improve the city’s ability to monitor incoming funds, saying the proposed technology would offer detailed, computerized accounts of parking usage and dollars coming in each day. Those accounts, he said, would be available for review by the city’s own parking manager, ensuring a greater level of accountability. He added that the city could also establish its own internal auditing system or hire an outside auditor to make sure both parties are doing their jobs.

Mayor Paul Dyster said the recommendations highlighted many of the parking concerns city officials had before agreeing to undertake the study.

“One of the problems we have now is that we are basically giving away the parking that is available on the street and trying to sell parking in the lots and garages and that’s inconsistent,” Dyster said. “You have to charge something for the on-street parking to create the turnover there.”  

He admitted that financing all of the proposed changes remains a question. He said the city is obligated to install a new revenue collection system at the ramp as part of the improvement project undertaken by the state-run USA Niagara Development Corp. Beyond that, Dyster said there are a variety of financing options to consider, noting that the most obvious and best option — using casino cash — is off the table right now because the city is not receiving funds it is owed due to the ongoing standoff between the state and the Seneca Nation.

“We’re going to circle back with the council and see where they would like to head on this,” Dyster said. “Obviously, we’re going to look at how we are going to finance the system.”