Warsaw City Planner Justin Taylor presents two parking ordinances to the Warsaw Common Council Monday night. Photo by David Slone, Times-Union.

By David Slone
Times-Union

WARSAW – City Planner Justin Taylor presented the Warsaw Common Council Monday night, Oct. 20, with two ordinances – one for general parking regulations, including fees, and the other related to fines and civil penalties for improper parking within the city. However, instead of asking the council to approve them, he asked the council members to review them for future consideration.

The council tabled both ordinances.

“So tonight I’d like to take a baby step in the direction of the downtown parking ordinance. Understanding that fall break was last week, I was pushing to see if we could get something in front of you today, but I think pushing this back to another council meeting is in the best interest of the city at this point. So I just ask that no action be taken tonight, but I wanted to get it in front of all of you,” Taylor said.

He said he’s going to continue to work with city attorney Scott Reust on polishing some of the language proposed in the ordinances. “Having reviewed it, I just wanted to make sure we’ve addressed any of your concerns or questions that you had now seeing it, a more refined draft of the parking ordinance,” Taylor stated.

Looking back on how the city got to this point, he said it was the result of a robust public engagement period where they got public feedback on the strategic plan for 2030, a downtown parking committee was formed and they referenced the Hyett Palma study.

“So a lot of public meetings were held, as well, with the Traffic Safety Commission, Main Street Warsaw,” Taylor said. “Over and over again, we heard the issues with downtown parking – lack of consistent enforcement, and that was due to some of our antiquated processes that we were using. Space shuffling, where people are just moving space to space to kind of game the system and (remove) the chalk marks off their tires. And then just managing the growth of our city. So distilling all of those comments down, those were the main three issues that we’re trying to resolve here.”

He pointed out the city also hasn’t updated its fines in many years, so currently the city’s parking tickets are $10 per violation.

Looking at what both of the ordinances propose, Taylor said the city wants to maintain the first two hours of parking downtown as free. A person doesn’t have to start a session every time they park downtown. While the first two hours would be free, the third hour will be $3 and then $1 an hour after that. Fines would be adjusted so they’re “punitive,” Taylor said, but not disruptive to the downtown. They would be $25 per violation.

“In the proposal, those fines would double if somebody did not pay it over 30 days, and then after 90 days of no payment, it could potentially even triple. So those are things that are built into the ordinance as it’s proposed,” he said.

A person would have 14 days to appeal a fine, which can be done with the app or at the violation clerk’s office at the Warsaw Police Department. “This would prevent people from shuffling spaces. So there’s two hours free within the zone of downtown, and that encompasses not all of the (Commercial-4) district but a chunk of it, as defined in the ordinance. After that point, if they chose not to pay to extend to stay in downtown, they would have to move outside of the zone that is associated with the two-hour free parking currently,” Taylor concluded.

Councilwoman Cindy Dobbins said she assumed they would review all of the city’s signage.

“I think one thing that stood out to me was the increase in handicapped parking fines, and I know most places you go it does have underneath the handicapped sign ‘$250 fine’ so it’s spelled out there,” she said. Taylor said that was something that was interesting to find out. The state has a minimum fine amount for handicapped parking of $100.

“So we were at $50 this whole time and we hadn’t updated it with what the state minimum should have been,” he said. The council could decide to go with the state minimum, but the city’s consultant recommended going to the $250, and Taylor said he thought that was fair. Dobbins agreed.

Taylor said there’s some more things that can be refined with the assistance of Reust, and it’ll be really ready for the council’s next meeting.

Councilman Mike Klondaris asked if there will still be 15-minute parking spots. Taylor said yes, and those will be designated by the Board of Public Works and Safety, but are moveable and don’t need to be designated in the ordinance.

Reust said Taylor was being very modest about his input into the ordinances so far.

“It’s a hard, hard, hard task. I don’t know how popular it’s going to be … but I meet with Justin from time to time, and he works so many hours on this. And it’s not his project, he doesn’t care whether this happens or doesn’t happen, it’s the city’s project, right? But some of this stuff that Justin knows is, he’s partnered with an experienced parking group – the Denison (Parking Inc.) has experience with this. So they’re helping Justin and I with some thoughts about how this is going to be implemented because it is a big thing, and you guys are going to be asked to weigh in heavily on that.”

Ultimately, Reust said there will be free parking in areas. He hears regularly about people’s frustrations with parking spot hopping, and downtown merchants having people park for several hours in front of their business. “I think some of the highlights of this is, previously though, you couldn’t stay over two hours. You didn’t have an option to stay over two hours, and with the help of the Denison people and the app and stuff, if you need to stay longer than two hours, then you just start paying – $3 for the third hour and $1 per hour afterwards, rather than the old days where you got a fine,” Reust stated.

He said he was very glad Taylor introduced the ordinances, and that Taylor is very open to hearing new ideas. He concluded by saying how much Taylor has worked on the ordinance and how Taylor just wants it to be right. The council then tabled the ordinances