By Dylana Milobar

Parking fee change just one part of reshaping downtown Kamloops transportation

Jan 16, 2019 | 3:41 PM

KAMLOOPS — Downtown patrons will now be saving some money when paying to park in the city centre, with Kamloops council deciding on Tuesday (Jan. 15) to lower street parking fees.

In a 5-3 vote in favour of reverting prices, council decided to lower costs back to $1.25 for each of the first two hours, from a $1.50 fee that was previously approved for 2019.

The decision reaches further than visitors just saving a few cents when they choose to park downtown, it’s all part of taking a hard look at transportation needs in the city’s core. 

Kamloops Central Business Improvement Association’s Executive Director, Carl DeSantis, says lowering prices by 25 cents for every hour of the two-hour block of time is the start of the city reshaping transportation in general for the downtown area.

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“It’s not just 25 cents. It gives people another reason to resist coming downtown, and we don’t want to see that. We want to open the doors and keep traffic flowing,” DeSantis says. “The metres are intended to keep the traffic flowing, not for longer term parking solutions.”

The motion was put forward by new councillor, Mike O’Reilly, also backed by his counterpart, Kathy Sinclair. However she did have some concerns.

“As much as I didn’t like going back on what had already been decided, and the metres had already been pre-programmed. I saw the opportunity with all of these new faces to sit down around the table and to really start from scratch,” Sinclair says. “Let’s start with a clean slate, and really work together.”

For now prices will be the same for each downtown block, but in the future, Sinclair thinks programming the metre pricing to vary depending on location could be an option.

“What some cities are doing is they are making it a graduated fee. So the further you get from the centre of downtown, the less expensive parking gets. So that might be something that we want to look at.”

Opposed to reversing the price increase was councillor Dieter Dudy. He says the cost of changing their minds will be more than the $12,000 it took to reprogram all the parking metres again.

“Add to that the fact that we’ve got $125,000 in potentially lost revenue. And that could have gone towards funding a parking study that we turned down just over a year ago.”

Along with figuring out parking needs, the city is gathering input for their Downtown Transportation Choices Strategy by offering an online survey through Let’s Talk Kamloops. 

“They’ve (city staff) effectively inserted a parking study into that whole process,” explains Dudy. “So hopefully we get some answers and we can come to terms with it. But I guess what I’d like to do moving forward is when we make a decision, let’s just stick by that decision.”

After collecting survey results, a draft of the Transportation Choices Strategy will be drawn up by the city in the spring, with final approval expected by summer of 2019.

“This is something that shouldn’t just be up to us, downtown, it should be up to everybody,” DeSantis stresses. “This is Kamloops’s downtown, and everybody’s got an opportunity to engage with the city to help them make decisions and help them collect the data they need to make those decisions.”