Parking in downtown Jackson will no longer be free. Jackson has been plagued by broken and obsolete parking meters for many years. What was a cash cow for other cities has been a money-loser for Jackson. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said those days were over as he rolled out Jackson's new smart parking meters at a press conference yesterday.
The new meters will be convenient for visitors in several ways. Customers will be able to use both credit cards and coins. A smartphone app that will make parking even more convenient will be available in six weeks. The Parkmobile app will help visitors find and pay for parking spaces. Running out of time on the meter? No problem. Customers can pay for extra time on the app. The app will provide information about parking vacancies in downtown garages.
Duncan Parking provided the upgrades and the app. The company ironically is the one that provided the original parking meters.
The city installed 146 new meters in the following areas:
- 100 & 200 blocks of East Capitol
- 100 & 200 blocks of West Capitol
- 100 block of North Lamar
- 100 block of South Lamar
- 500 block of Pearl Street
- 200 block of President Street
A sensor is placed in the form of a black circle in each parking space. The sensor notifies the meter whether the space is occupied. The new meters will send alerts when they malfunction. Each meter will state the enforcement hours.
The current parking rate of fifty cents per hour is as obsolete as the old meters. The new parking meter charges will be $1 per hour for the first two hours, $3 for the third hour, and $4 per hour after the third hour.
Meter Maids will no longer have to check each parking meter. The city will provide each Meter Maid with a tablet that is connected to the parking meter system. The tablet can scan a license plate and issue a ticket.
Parking meter problems took a toll on parking revenue that was once $500,000 per year. Planning Director Jordan Hillman said parking meter revenue was only $50,000 last year. Ms. Hillman said the new meters should generate $200,000 to $250,000 per year. The new revenue will be invested in upgrading more meters.
Mayor Lumumba said new meters will be placed in areas that do not have them. The city will operate and maintain the meters instead of contracting these functions out to a private company.
The Mayor said something about placing boots on the vehicles of repeat violaters who do not pay their fines.
62 comments:
Good move. I've always thought it was insane that Oxford has parking meters that are more modern (and reliable) than Jackson.
$4/hr ?
If anything should put Jackson on the right track, this should!
The meter upgrade went so well with the water meters they figured why not try it again
Will the last business owner leaving Jackson please put a quarter in a few parking meters downtown. The city needs the change.
For over 5 weeks now restaurant guests are not allowed to sit at a bar top! Social distancing restrictions running wild. This is poor logic by our "progressive" Mayor. He allows bars and strip clubs to reopen and flaunt his restrictions, while every day servers, bartenders, and cooks watch their business fade away to Rankin and Madison. No, they are not the restaurant owners; but, their tips and hours will continue to suffer.
Restaurant owner on High Street just announced he is moving to Flora.
$4 for the 4th hour, essentially making it a dollar per hour. The first $1 gets you two.
They will be destroyed in six months. (just like everything else in Jackson) I often wonder why the city can't keep garbage picked up off the sides of streets and grass cut. What do the employees of the maintenance department do all day?
Another reason every commercial business is moving to Ridgeland.
I'm sure these meters will be as "state of the art" as Jackson's water meters.
They actually have that many folks still parking in Jackson to make profit?
Really ?
A Jackson Mississippi parking App ?
This should be very entertaining.
A lot of thoughts.
1. Isn’t this the absolute worst time to install parking meters? I work downtown and there’s not as much traffic these days.
2. I have a hard time seeing the city maintaining this “app”.
3. I have a hard time seeing the city checking these meters for credit card skimmers.
4. I have a hard time seeing these parking meters not being vandalized immediately and never getting repaired.
I’m not being a hater but I work downtown. I see what the city does and doesn’t do.
Lipstick on the rotting corpse of a pig.
Just like the new JATRAN buses
And the Coast Guard/JPD cruisers
What Jackson really needs is a natural disaster to wipe out 3/4 of the city.
More evidence of a modern, radical, city.
Just think if they would have pulled this off when there were still people commuting to downtown Jackson to work. Now, this is just a tax on Jacksonians working for city, county or state government.
So, how much was the outlay and when will these meters begin to generate a profit for the city?
Another tax
Perfect timing, during a pandemic when we are all encouraged to work from home. Parking will never be a problem again in downtown Jackson even after things get back to normal.
The parking garage owners finally engaged a competent lobbyist.
I would MUCH rather pay a dollar than stick quarter after quarter in a broken meter and then hope I don't get a ticket. The extra piece of mind is worth an extra quarter or two.
I haven't been downtown in 6 months. I'm still paying for the parking garage because we'll ostensibly be back to normal sometime soon. Possibly Valve Time soon though. Is the traffic light?
Most of you commenters suffer from Optoano Neurosis, which means your optic nerve is connected to your anus; thus you have a shitty outlook on everything. Jackson actually fixes something, and y'all bitch about that too.
New meters in Jackson, the radical city. What could possibly go wrong?
Does this mean that the employees in the parking meter section will actually have to report to work every day? The "no-show" jobs are history?
5:21- aren't you witty.
Fixing parking meters is nothing to beat your chest about. The fact is, you pay state income tax, property tax, high car tags, various permits and business operating fees. Buy a car pay 5% of the purchase price. Sell it in a couple years they pay the tax again. They sell it and again the state collects a tax. In fact, the state likely makes more on the car than the manufacturer.
So forgive us for not applauding the city finding another way to take money out of our pockets.
How do these meters handle it when someone pays with a 16 penny ring shank nail and either a 3 pound sledge or one of them cordless nail guns like people are always shoplifting from Home Despot?
Cause in Jackson if they don't know they probably bout to find out!
Anonymous said at 3:32 PM: "$4 for the 4th hour, essentially making it a dollar per hour. The first $1 gets you two."
Umm, no. You fail at both reading comprehension and math. The four hour total is $9, or $2.25 per hour.
3:32 - go back to Pisgah High and take your 3rd grade math again.
Let me make it simple for you, or at least try:
First Hour -- $1.00
Second Hour -- 1.00
Third Hour --- 3.00
Fourth Hour -- 4.00
Four Hours, add the above numbers and it is $9.00. Divide that by 4 and it is $2.50 per hour.
If it were five hours, add another $4.00 and it would be $13.00, divided by 5 and it would be $2.60 per hour.
Please tell us all how your math gives a total of $1.00/hour.
We will wait.
Putting parking meters downtown will ruin the town and run out all the businesses & visitors. How dare Jackson follow Oxford’s awful example. Oxford has been lost for years because of them and Jackson is next!
As much as it pains me to say the city might finally - after two years or more of this discussion - done something right. Asbhy Foote has been pushing this issue since he first went into office; tilting at windmills could be charged, but still -- he tried to at least do something.
But now, the city has taken these new meters on, but decided not to take the second part of the contract and that was letting the company that sells and installs the meters to maintain them. Gotta keep them jobs in Jackson, you know.
That will be the failure of this venture. Just as when the City kicked out Seimens to maintain and complete the water meter system, it went to hell. This will follow. Will be a good start, but once the meters need maintenance the existing 'maintenance bunch' will have to deal with it. And they don't have an idea how to fix anything - an air conditioner, a backhoe, a dump truck, and for sure not a high-tech electronic parking meter.
Won't be but a couple of years until this system fails for this one reason - that the city council, and of course the HonorableKushMayor can't get past the fact that there are some things that should be contracted to others - and they don't necessarily have to hire Jackson residents making it a jobworks program.
But the Mayor doesn't have to worry about that - the failure of the meters will be after next summer's elections.
In the event some of these meters fail to work . . . God help anyone trying to get satisfaction from the City of Jackson.
6,.25 1 +1+3+4= 9. 9 divided by 4 is $2.25 not $2.50. Are you a product of the Jackson public school system?
“ Most of you commenters suffer from Optoano Neurosis, which means your optic nerve is connected to your anus; thus you have a shitty outlook on everything. Jackson actually fixes something, and y'all bitch about that too.
September 2, 2020 at 5:21 PM”
———————————————-
Might want to wait for them to fix it first before proclaiming its fixed. Meanwhile while we wait feel free to let us know about anything the city has fixed
I am convinced that 95% of these readers live in a stucco house in a cow field in Madison.
Taking jobs "in house" by state and local governments, in order to grow their fiefdoms, is getting pretty rampant. Mississippi should take a page from the Feds, who have figured out that if they put companies out of business there is no one left to pay taxes. Government agencies should be required to show ACTUAL COST of taking these jobs for themselves so the taxpayers can see that the final bill is actually much higher when you add in the government agency's overhead. This app developer might have quoted $75,000 to maintain this app when a city employee making $60,000 year could maintain it instead, but what about that city employee's government vehicle, cell phone, office space, computer, software licenses, office furniture, secretarial support, utilities, vacation, sick and "comp" time, health benefits, retirement, etc.? What about the 30% taxes the private business was going to turn around and pay right back on that $75,000? If an agency already has the expertise and capability in house, fine. But more often than not, taxpayers are getting a bigger bill for a poorer result at triple the time.
Today I put almost a dollar’s worth of change into one of those bandits near the Mayflower; never could get it to register more that 24 minutes.
Another tax on the poor folk...and when you receive a ticket and don’t pay it, I suppose there will be a bench warrant issued for your arrest, and then when you get stopped for not renewing your tag, the cops find the warrant and then resist arrest and get shot by the police...
6:25 you might want to check your math Hint: $9.00 divided by 4 is not $2.50 Maybe $2.25???
Someone earlier said, "What Jackson really needs is a natural disaster to wipe out 3/4 of the city."
Um, it has been having one for years although "natural" might not be quite the term I'd use. In any case, I'd offer that at least 3/4 of the city is pretty much wiped out already.
Does the plan include emptying the meters every couple of hours so as to deter Cool Hand Lukedarvious et al or was there a failure to communicate?
No, Jackson is not maintaining its own app, nor is a special app being created for this.
The Parkmobile app is already used for many cities, including New Orleans. The six week timeframe will likely be for setting Jackson and its layout of meters within the app.
Rode by City Hall looking for parking yesterday. It's a dump and run down with tape across walkways. Its a dump....
Local politicians love hiring employees and doing jobs in house. It’s usually family, friends and or key political supporters and family. Doesn’t matter if they can do the job or not. Also, it gives them more control over the work.
6:25 must’ve gone to the Jethro Bodine School of Cipherin
Steve McQueen will be on the chain gang for cutting the meter heads off if the pipes...
They need to add meters around the Woolfolk building - you can never find a place to park! Employees park there early in the morning until they go home at 4 or 5pm. DFA needs to require that the employees are parking in the garage or on the Sun and Sand parking lot!!
"What Jackson really needs is a natural disaster to wipe out 3/4 of the city." They have been counting on Covid to accomplish that, but we all know how ineffective that is. A earthquake will cause this before Covid does.
@12:27
try Paul Newman
"The city will operate and maintain the meters instead of contracting these functions out to a private company."
So... this will last until spring?
12:27
Paul Newman, not Steve McQueen.
@8:10...I knew at least 1 of JJ's readers would have watched it...
No mention of who and how big of a cut someone is receiving for the credit/debit card transactions. Follow the money.
How long before the city sues the meter manufacturer, like it did Siemens
This is a typical rate scale in cities of similar size.
One reason is to stop those working downtown who park all day for less that parking lot space would be and, more importantly, to free up spaces for customers and clients with business downtown.
Yup. The bag rate was $5 a day. Several businesses would just pay that fee and permanently bag off a parking space. Such as a law firm on Capitol Street. Or a business by Smith Park on President Street. What is meant for special events or temporary needs turns into city-subsidized long-term parking.
If they can deploy all this whiz-bang technology to catch parking scofflaws, why don't they do the same to water meters??
Years ago I remember a certain agency director got his car booted in his "reserved" parking spot on the corner of Pearl and Lamar streets. Hilarity ensued as the meter maid clearly didn't understand the "don't you know who I am" excuse for violating city parking ordinances. In another incident, a female employee of that same agency nearly got into a fist fight with the meter maid as she tried to prevent her from feeding the meter.
7:36 PM 8/2: You make very good points about internal v. outsourcing and the real cost difference, but the problem is that cities like Jackson that are singularly focused on exceeding minority participation goals are too often willing to pay 25% to 50% more for a service to be sure that a minority company is included. So in their case, it may actually be cheaper to keep the service in house, even though they probably aren't adequately staffed.
Good idea, poor timing. As others have stated, even before March, the amount of people downtown has greatly declined since the 90s, now add in telework and over the next few years even fewer people will come downtown. Recouping the city's initial investment will likely take much longer than forecast.
Well...........
13, multiply by one,
Still got 13, but wasn't that fun !!
I honestly don't think they care about recovering lost revenue. This is low hanging fruit to convince low-information Jackson voters that they are doing something. Never mind the craters in front of the new meters, or the geysers that are forming from busted water lines, BY GOD we have new parking meters and new pretty colored buses with no riders!
"Never mind the craters in front of the new meters,
or the geysers that are forming from busted water lines".
Well said.
The new meters are multi-purpose. They will automatically fill pot-holes, and arrest any evil doers in the vicinity. So, what's there not to like?
Not exactly on point, but: Two years ago I contested a parking violation ticket before a jurdge in Jacktown. I lost my case. Anyway, while telling the judge that the 'no parking here to corner' sign could not be seen from the street...he interrupts me to ask, "Don't you people have parking meters in Madison County?" Ah...nope.
It's not a municipal issue, but why is UMMC the only Jackson hospital that charges for garage parking?
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