City of Northville May Soon Switch to Flat Fee for Parking Tickets

The may soon be changing its parking ticket fees to a flat fee of $10 and may also be beefing up its enforcement efforts.

"Recently, at the request of several downtown merchants, the City evaluated the parking system to determine if there were ample spaces in each of the lots for short term, customer/client parking," according to Downtown Development Authority director Lori Ward's report. "The answer was no."

The DDA board voted Tuesday morning to pass along to the City Council its parking committee’s recommendation to change the fee. The city’s current system charges first-time parking violators $5, with rates increasing after that for repeat offenders.

The aim, Mayor Chris Johnson said, is not to generate revenue. It is to enforce the time limits in the city’s lots so that parking is available for downtown visitors.

Police Chief Gary Goss agreed, adding that “the problem, in all honesty, is business owners. … We’ve really bent over backwards to accommodate first-time offenders.”

He said that in the past, the city has waived tickets of people who receive tickets for the first time.

But they are not the problem.

At issue are the workers in the downtown office buildings who fill the lots early in the morning and use the convenient, limited hours spaces all day. There has been little enforcement in the past few years, DDA director Lori Ward said. In the past, the DDA has tried to work with the offices whose workers park for extended periods of time, namely in the Old Church Square lot, and has sent letters asking that they comply with the restrictions.

“Chalking tires and handing out tickets is the easy part,” Goss said, comparing the ticketing system to the City of Plymouth's. Putting the info into a database to track repeat offenders and following up on payment are the time- and manpower-consuming elements to parking enforcement, he said.

Parking is especially problematic now that data for the past several months shows 80 percent to 100 percent parking lot occupancy, city manager Patrick Sullivan said. In the past parking restrictions were not enforced because finding spaces were not such a big problem.

Johnson said that he wasn’t confident that a $10 ticket would do much to deter repeat offenders. He said some might consider it on par with a standard parking rate.

"This is a behavior-change thing we're trying to do here," he said.

The next city council meeting was re-scheduled for Feb. 24 at 7:30 p.m.