City hall uses revenues from parking meters to help with everyday operational services, but it doesn’t collect much when those meters don’t function or are missing altogether.
During city council’s recent regular meeting, Coun. Crystal Froese inquired about several downtown parking meter posts that were missing their heads. She thought there were more missing than is typical, while she wondered when the operations department would replace those meters and fix the other non-functional ones.
Residents should use the city’s MyCivic app to report the location of broken and missing parking meters, which is the best way to confirm that public works will fix them, said Bevan Harlton, director of operations.
Meanwhile, he hadn’t heard of any reasons why there have been delays in fixing those infrastructure items, while he hasn’t heard of a spike in missing meter heads recently, either. However, that’s because winter is finally ending and people are coming downtown more often.
Harlton reiterated that residents should use the MyCivic city app to report missing meter heads to public works.
“So obviously, if I’m parking downtown and there’s no meter there, I’m not going to report that because then that means I actually get to park for free,” laughed Froese. “So I don’t think we’re going to expect the public to be reporting those too often.”
The councillor then wondered whether the city’s meter readers could report meter heads that were inoperable or “absolutely completely missing,” which would be a more efficient way to address this issue.
“Thank you for the feedback and it’s well taken. I hadn’t considered the ability of MyCivic (app) to perform a service when people don’t necessarily want that done,” smiled Harlton, adding he would inquire with the parking meter reader staff about this issue and produce a report for the next council meeting.
The next regular council meeting is Monday, April 8.
