City Council Renews RSVP Program, Hikes Price, Eyes More Parking Fixes

One year after it the city’s parking enforcement strategy, the Mill Valley City Council dove back into the issue this week amidst what city officials called mysteriously low revenue from parking meters.

The council agreed to dig into a number possible parking changes at its July 5 meeting, including expanding sales of downtown parking permits beyond residents of the 94941 zip code, getting rid of Sunday meter enforcement and adding parking meters to the spaces behind that don’t already have them.

The council agreed without a vote to raise the cost of the Resident Shopper Vehicle Program (RSVP), which allows Mill Valley residents to avoid feeding the meters, from $30 to $40 annually. Bernal said the new RSVP stickers will be go sale in the next few weeks in advance of the July 31 expiration of the current stickers.

The price hike signaled that while the program has exceeded expectations, selling more than 2,900 permits in its first year, it has fallen nearly $7,000 short of its projected revenue.

But city officials said the parking program faces a much bigger issue: overall revenue from parking meters was down $52,130 from its projected budget of $306,870, a nearly 17 percent shortfall. The drop came despite the addition of Sunday meter enforcement accounting for approximately $50,000 in meter revenue and $80,000 in total fine revenue, including parking tickets.

“It’s obvious that the revenue we anticipated both from meters and from fines are below what we had expected,” City Manager Jim McCann said.

The shortfall comes one year after the council addressed a $61,000 parking program deficit by , adding , from 50 cents an hour to 75 cents, hiking parking ticket rates, as well as to cushion the blow for local residents.

The overall parking program for the 2010-2011 fiscal year ending June 30 is expected to fall short of its total parking-related revenue of $446,200 by $59,040, or more than 13 percent.

“We really need to figure that one out,” Vice Mayor Garry Lion said.

Lion said the success of the RSVP program clearly was having an impact on meter revenue. But both city staff and the council agreed the response to it has been so strong that should be continued and expanded. They also agreed to add a $10 surcharge for non-residents.

The council did not come to an agreement on how much to expand it. Several councilmembers backed expanding the RSVP program to anyone who wanted to buy a sticker, while Police Chief Angel Bernal said expanding it without geographic limits would entice less frequent downtown visitors to buy them.

“Those people would be paying the same amount of money (for the permit) but likely using it less than residents do,” Bernal said. “It would likely be more profitable as a result if we extend it to be outside of Marin.”

But Lion disagreed, saying that the program should be limited to Southern Marin residents to avoid encouraging the downtown store employees who live elsewhere to buy RSVP stickers instead of paying for employee parking permits, which have designated areas to parking outside of the immediate downtown square.

The council also backed the idea of pulling the sale of parking permits to employees of downtown stores out of the hands of the , which faces a leadership void since chief executive Kathy Severson was earlier this year due to financial problems.

Because the chamber had been active in marketing the sales of permits to downtown businesses, it had been allowed to retain the approximately $12,000 in annual revenue the program generated. City officials plan to take that effort and subsequent revenue in-house, and hope to identify other ways to assist the chamber’s finances, McCann said.

Councilmembers suggested a number of other ideas, including expanding meters from two hours to four during special events like the .

Mayor Ken Wachtel floated the idea of doing away with the city’s longstanding , hoping to find a revenue source that would counteract his interest in getting rid of Sunday meter enforcement.

“People don’t expect there to be parking fines on Sundays,” Wachtel said. “It isn’t doing our merchants any good to have people coming into the city to shop and have them get parking tickets.”

The council expects to weigh those issues and others at its July 5 meeting.

“I would rather have us try things than not try things,” Concilwoman Stephanie Moulton-Peters said. “I don’t think we’ve got this totally figured out and that’s healthy.”