Thursday, February 13, 2025–12:30 p.m.
-David Crowder, WRGA News-
The City of Rome appears to be moving away from the idea of having a third party handle parking enforcement downtown.
Discussions regarding having someone besides the city come in and enforce parking have been going on since late 2022 and the Rome City Commission even approved an ordinance amendment that would allow third-party parking management. However, Kelley Ledford, assistant to the city manager, told the Rome Downtown Development Authority during their Thursday meeting that there have been a number of changes in parking since those discussions. For instance, the county will take over the management and enforcement of the Fourth and Sixth Avenue Parking Decks on April 1.
“We will no longer be doing anything with the Fourth and Sixth Avenue decks,” she said. “We’re not cleaning it. We’re not patrolling it. We’re not issuing tickets, permits or anything for those two decks. The county will be doing that on their own.”
Fourth Avenue has always been the county’s deck and the city had just been doing management for it. The Sixth Avenue deck, of course, was turned over to the county as part of the Local Option Sales Tax negotiations.
“That makes it a lot different as far as our revenues and expenses look when it comes to third-party management,” Ledford added. “It changed quite a bit because that is a revenue source that was going to help even out the third-party parking management fees, projected revenues, and those sorts of things.”
Officials also recently learned that the parking software the city pays for does much more than originally thought. The city recently re-negotiated the software package and the hardware for a new parking vehicle for a better price, according to Ledford. The time-consuming task of taking permit applications and payments over the phone or in person can all be done through the website.
“It’s so much less stress on this office because if someone wants a permit they don’t have to come here anymore, they can do it online,” Ledford said. “If somebody wants an automatic draft for their permit to come out every month, it can be done online. We have so many options now that we never knew we had.”
According to Ledford, the goal of the new parking program is to turn it into a more helpful parking service.
“Yes, there will still be enforcement and giving tickets,” she said. However, we need to make downtown a little more friendly and happy to some folks. We hear it all the time that some people dread coming downtown because they are afraid they will get a ticket.”
A marketing campaign is being planned to help explain to the public how all of the new services will work.
