Big changes coming for downtown parking in Wichita next year. Here are some details

Parking in downtown Wichita will get more expensive next year.

Motorists can expect both higher meter rates and increased fines for parking violations in 2025.

License plate-scanning technology will be used to identify and ticket vehicles that parked without paying or overstayed their welcome in metered stalls, a job the city plans to outsource to a yet-to-be-named private company.

Wichita’s overhaul of the parking system is geared toward maximizing both government profits and the number of visitors to downtown businesses, using new fee structures to discourage downtown workers and residents from parking all day in the most convenient stalls in front of businesses.

Just how much parking rates will increase downtown and where new pay-to-park zones will be located have not yet been established, although the plan is to preserve at least some free parking.

The Wichita City Council approved a slew of changes to the city code on Tuesday that will help make the parking plan a reality.

The council voted to establish higher minimum fines for parking infractions, including increasing meter violation and overtime parking fines from $10 to $35 and increasing all other parking violations from a $35 penalty to $50.

Public parking will be managed using a variety of tools, including new meter heads that make use of mobile-app technology, pay stations, automated access gates and permit programs, according to a city staff report.

“It seems like every time I’m downtown, I see parking meters that don’t work or don’t accept, and when I travel to other cities and see the updated technology, it’s about time that Wichita’s getting with it,” outgoing council member Bryan Frye said before the vote.

After an initial $648,421 start-up investment, the overhauled parking system is expected to generate $2,745,926 annually. Factoring in management costs and debt service, the parking system is anticipated to net the city more than $1.4 million a year in profits.

Assistant City Manager Troy Anderson said those profits will be rolled back into the parking fund and used to pay for upkeep on public lots and garages.

“It’s going to take years to generate revenue to respond to deferred maintenance,” Anderson said.

“We want to improve the overall customer experience. We’re not going to be able to do that without starting to generate revenue as a result of passing the cost onto the actual user.”

Anderson said the target date is for new parking technology to go live on Jan. 1, 2025, after a year of communicating with neighborhood associations and property owners about the changes.

“I’ve had a lot of constituents reach out to me on this,” outgoing council member Jeff Blubaugh said. “A lot of them are asking, we’re trying to drive more people to downtown, but we’re going to make it harder? Parking’s going to be harder.”

Blubaugh and Vice Mayor Mike Hoheisel were the only two council members to vote against changes to the city code Tuesday. The downtown parking plan itself was unanimously approved last March.

Downtown parking logistics

In 2022, the city outsourced management of most publicly owned parking spaces downtown to The Car Park, which receives $29,000 a month to run operations.

Since taking over, the company has urged the city to automate much of its parking system, eliminating parking-related jobs as a cost-cutting measure. That includes replacing workers outside City Hall with an automated ticketing and gate system used to charge visitors.

Esau Freeman, business representative for SEIU local lodge 513, which represents 800 city employees, told council members he doesn’t like to see another city service privatized.

“We have technologies where we no longer have a human being we can talk with about this and have them help us or deal with this as people,” Freeman said. “We’ve got robots doing human jobs and we’ve got the buck being passed.”

Frye said private management can work if there’s proper staff oversight.

“Making sure that what we’re hearing from our neighbors is then reflected in how the system is managed,” he said.

“The key is going to be making sure that we have a flexible system that can adapt for demand and surge pricing and those opportunities when parking is at a premium.”

Council member Maggie Ballard, who voted to support the code changes, said she does have concerns about bringing the rest of the city’s downtown parking system into alignment with parking outside Century II, where coin-operated meters were replaced with a mobile-app payment system and prices were increased by 300%. They now start at $5 through the ParkMobile app.

She said some people, like her own father, will never download an app for parking, and that new meters should preserve motorists’ option to pay with coins.

“These meter heads will take coins,” Anderson said. “They will take credit cards, and they will also work with a mobile app. Being able to have a meter head take a bill pay becomes really, really expensive.

“Old Town might be a good example that rather than proliferating the landscape with meter heads, you find convenient locations for kiosks. Then, those kiosks may take bill pay.”

Council members agreed one important part of outreach to stakeholders between now and 2025 will be communicating where visitors can still park for free, including on the second floor of the garage at the River Vista Apartments next to the Advanced Learning Library.

Anderson said there are approximately 12,000 available parking stalls downtown and that a combination of public and private parking account for roughly 60% of all downtown parcels of land, not including right of ways.

“Unfortunately, the occupancy of those some 12,000 [parking spaces] is only thirty to forty percent, which tells us — industry standard, we should be looking at about an eighty-five percent occupancy rate. We have grossly way too many parking stalls to serve the demand that exists out there today,” Anderson said.

He cited MIT professor Eran Ben-Joseph’s 2012 book, “Rethinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking,” which notes that “Generous parking requirements and low parking prices tend to discourage infill development and encourage sprawl.”

“If a parking lot today is vacant or under-utilized, that’s a lot that could be utilized for housing or for other retail or commerce,” Anderson said.

“The lower we get that number [of empty parking stalls], the higher real estate potential exists.”