 "Photo: Alyssa Benedetto")
April 1 will mark the city of Newark’s official elimination of free Sunday parking. For Elizabeth Dryer, Newark resident and manager of Homegrown Café on Main Street, this is not a welcome change.
“I think it’s a bummer,” Dryer said. “I know the city needs money, but it still stinks.”
She now pays $12 to $15 daily to park downtown, with the exception of Sunday.
“It’s more of a psychological thing,” Dryer said. “Just knowing there was that free day that you could come down to Main Street and not have to pay for parking.”
Newark resident Rebecca Howell echoed Dryer’s sentiments.
“I liked free Sunday parking a lot,” Howell said. “You kind of have it in the back of your head, like, ‘Oh, that’s right. I can go to Newark because parking is free.’ ”
With the city’s budget hammered by snow removal costs and the struggling national economy, city officials were forced to seek out sources of untapped revenue, said Maureen Feeney- Roser, head of the Downtown Newark Partnership.
“We thought that it made more sense to suggest that the town begin to charge for parking on Sundays as opposed to recommending individual taxes against businesses or residents,” Feeney-Roser said. “Parking is a user’s fee, so it spreads the cost across a wider population.”
City officials estimate the Sunday parking fees will bring in approximately $68,000 annually, she said. Newark Police will ticket metered spots and municipal lots on Main Street from 1 p.m. on Sunday until 1 a.m. Monday.
Michael Suh, owner of Mizu Sushi Bar on Main Street, said he was unaware of the new Sunday parking regulation until recently.
“I noticed that they hired a few new guys to give out tickets for the expired meters,” Suh said. “I thought that was going to help boost their revenues, so they wouldn’t be forced to eliminate this free Sunday parking.”
Junior Andre Belgrave said he is not surprised by the city’s decision to abolish free Sunday parking.
“It just adds to the list of ways Newark is sucking me dry financially,” Belgrave said.
Senior Derek Falcone said he typically parks in the metered spots close to Colburn Laboratory, where he does his homework on Sundays.
“I guess I’m just going to have to walk on Sundays from now on,” Falcone said. “I stay there really late, so I’ll have to walk back really late at night.”
He said he was surprised by the change because Newark already charges “an exorbitant amount of money” for parking during the week.
Kim Gebhart, general manager of Cosi on Main Street, said she thinks Sunday parking fees will negatively impact downtown businesses.
“I had a couple of guests come in yesterday saying they won’t be coming back down to Newark, to Main Street, because they have to pay for parking,” Gebhart said. “That was the only reason they said they came on Sundays.”
Dryer said business owners have always experienced an influx of traffic on Sundays because of the lift on parking fees.
“People come down to Main Street, they can park for free and they don’t feel rushed,” she said.
The three business owners said they will offer parking validation during the week, and this policy will soon apply on Sundays.
Dryer said Homegrown Café offers one hour parking validation tickets for the municipal lot behind the restaurant.
“Even with that, customers sometimes don’t feel like that’s enough,” she said. “We get the argument that, ‘I can’t eat in an hour.’ I don’t think they realize that we have to pay for those validations. We don’t get them for free.”
Parking validation is subsidized by both the city and the businesses, Roser said.
“There is an ad hoc committee that is being created to talk about validation and to talk about how we might better get the word out about the validation program,” she said.
Roser said the elimination of free Sunday parking is the first of a series of recommendations the DNP is making to scale back the city’s budget and increase revenue. Other ideas are yet to be announced, she said.
Suh said he is unsure of the magnitude the change will have on his business.
“I think it might hurt it slightly,” he said. “It sucks, but what can you do?”
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7 comments
" Heres a tip to newark ,account for cushion and emergency spending in your budget for when we do just so happen to get major snowstorms so the money is there if needed. If not then guess what? That unspent money in your budget is a surplus and you can spend it on something else."If Newark had put that extra money for a snow emergency (which would have been silly considering how uncommon such harsh winters are in Delaware), they would have had to take that money from another part of the budget. Just putting it in your budget does not create funding, it only designates where your current money will go over the year.