Quinte West City Council has approved maintaining its current free parking system for residents and visitors.
The lone exception would be for on-street parking in Trenton where there would be a time limit of two hours of free parking before fines would be implemented.
The resolution also calls for the continued downtown parking enforcement of illegal or dangerous parking activities.
In addition, the city will prepare a tender for a new parking software program for issuing fines and processing.
Implementation costs of the new program will be brought forward to the 2024 capital and operating budget.
In a report to council, two options were presented.
One would be to implement new payment machines while the other was to maintain the current free system in place with the latter being what council ultimately voted on.
If a paid parking model was voted on by council, the report stated that the revenue that could be generated for the city would be around $71,380 annually.
Councillor Lynda Reid expressed her support for the free parking model, saying that the potential loss in revenue from a paid parking system is minimal.
“When we go to the east of Trenton or the west of Trenton it’s all free parking and we do want people to come down and use our downtown core and support our downtown businesses,” Reid said to council.
“So I think it’s an unfair thing to start charging for parking, especially when you’re not going to make any more revenue with or without paid parking.”
Councillor Don Kuntze had mixed emotions, saying that revenue is still revenue.
“So, in the report, it does suggests that the revenue is not huge, but it’s still revenue,” Kuntze explained.
“If I recall from last spring, our citizens were wanting us to make sure their taxes were going to be in order and this would be a way to helping all of the citizens keep their taxes in order by generating the most amount of revenue that we could.”
One option that staff were asked to investigate in the report was the possibility of charging out of town residents for use of city boat launches.
In the report, staff did not recommend that option based on the operational and enforcement requirements in relation to potential revenue.
Councillor Zack Card also reminded councillors that they could revisit the parking system in the future if it is not as effective as once thought.
“The nice thing about this option, rather than putting out the funds and buying a bunch of the meters and the systems, is we can revisit this next year or the year after if we deem it to be a failure,” Card said.
