Conway adding paid downtown parking as prelude to multi-million dollar garage

Linda Miller loves her weekly lunch trips to Conway, but her routine could be changing if city leaders move forward with a plan to monetize downtown parking.

“It takes away from the small town feel,” Miller, who lives in Myrtle Beach, said while enjoying a sandwich at Kingston Park along Conway’s Main Street. “Why even have a park if it’s going to cost you to sit here?”

Mayor Barbara Blain-Bellamy says it’s the cost of progress.

“What we predict is in a very few years, a parking garage is going to be absolutely necessary, with a huge cost,” she said at an April 17 City Council meeting. “We see the parking meters as an opportunity for everybody that parks downtown contribute to a pool that starts to pay for that, not just taxpayers who live here.”

The city is soliciting bids for the cost of installing 500 meters in parts of the downtown currently for spaces currently limited to two hours — a policy Blain-Bellamy said has become “unenforceable.”

Officials first floated the idea of a $1 hourly parking rate at a March budget retreat and are expected to formally take up the issue later this year. The $250,000 cost likely would be covered by hospitality tax revenues and included in the city’s 2023-24 budget.

Should Conway move to paid parking, it would join surrounding communities including Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach and Surfside Beach — where officials have said charging for parking allows them to offset costs related to growth.

“We don’t want to increase taxes, but the money has to come from somewhere,” Blain-Bellamy said.

Russell Fowler, co-owner of The Haberdashery along Fourth Ave., said many of the parking issues he’s seen has been the result of lax policing rather than limited spaces.

“We really, over the last four or five years, have not had a lot of complaints from customers because they are finding parking spaces, but I still think that would be an abundance of parking spaces if we take those people who are breaking the law off the street,” he said.

City leaders in February inked a six-month deal with Coastal Carolina student Antonio Knight, giving him exclusive rights to rent 20 motorized scooters from the Riverwalk to Collins Park.

“What we’ve noticed is they have been very well used. They’re about town on a regular basis,” said Conway Downtown Alive executive director Hillary Howard. “In the greater historic district, you have a lot of residential housing and those people might live nine or ten blocks from downtown, so it’s an easy way to commute.”