City Council adopts 2012 appropriations

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

Van Wert City Council approved permanent appropriations legislation and also continued a decades-long discussion on downtown parking during meetings held Monday in Council Chambers.

Council unanimously approved a permanent appropriations ordinance for the current year, following amendments submitted by City Auditor Martha Balyeat during a Finance Committee meeting held prior to the regular Council meeting.

Balyeat said the permanent appropriations legislation includes a reserve fund totaling nearly $500,000.

During a Streets and Alleys Committee meeting on Monday evening, Chairman Pete Weir continued a discussion on downtown parking sparked by complaints from several downtown business owners who would like to see other business people and employees of downtown offices use off-street parking. Doing so would allow customers to park closer to their destinations.

Weir and Main Street Van Wert Interim Program Manager Adam Ries conducted video surveys of downtown parking on two occasions. In the surveys of the 220 two-hour parking spots, Weir and Ries said 42 vehicles violated the two-hour parking requirement during one survey and 47 vehicles did so during the second survey.

With an average annual income of $21,000 per parking space — based on a conservative estimate of customers spending $5 during 30 minutes — the parking violations would cost downtown businesses a total of $882,000 annually for 42 violators and an estimated $987,000 for the survey showing 47 violators.

Ries said two-hour parking violators also hurt downtown economic development, since many people thinking of opening a business in Van Wert avoid the downtown area because of the lack of on-street parking.

Mayor Don Farmer also noted that he feels county government needs to do more to keep its employees from parking in the two-hour spaces, noting as an example that instructions for jury duty in Van Wert County Common Pleas Court advises prospective jurors to use on-street parking instead of the open city parking lots that border on the downtown area.

As has been the problem over the years, though, the question is how to enforce the two-hour parking limits, since downtown parking violators don’t usually respond to pleas to use off-street parking.

Parking meters aren’t a viable option, said Councilman At-Large Stan Agler — who was mayor in the 1970s and 1980s — because they’re expensive and also a negative to customers who receive tickets because they either forgot to put money in the meter or the meter time expired while they were shopping.

Agler noted that downtown business owners were happy to see the meters taken out 30 years ago.

GPS technology currently being used in Annapolis, Md., could be a solution to determining who has overstayed their two-hour limit, but then the question becomes who would be in charge of citing violators.

City Law Director John Hatcher said even volunteers would need to have a contract with the city.

One person who attended the meeting suggested created a public “Wall of Shame” that would include photos of the vehicles of two-hour parking violators.

Another meeting on the topic was scheduled for May 14.

Also Monday, City Council unanimously rejected a rezoning request from Barry Thatcher, citing the lack of information on what was planned at the location in question. The action wasn’t taken right off, though, as Council members erroneously voted down a request to introduce the rezoning legislation. Failure to introduce a measure doesn’t reject the legislation, but merely postpones action until the next Council meeting.

Although Law Director John Hatcher said Council members could just do nothing and let the rezoning request die from lack of action prior to the expiration of a statutory deadline, City Council voted to reconsider its action and this time followed through with the correct procedure to reject the legislation.

Hatcher was also forced to come up with a last-minute resolution authorizing Mayor Farmer to sign a contract with Delphos attorney Clayton Osting so that Osting could represent the city in legal actions where Hatcher has a conflict of interest. That measure was also unanimously approved.

Council also approved on third and final reading an ordinance authorizing the mayor to receive property in Vision Industrial Park from the Community Improvement Corporation. The acreage was originally included in an option taken out by Life Star Rescue Inc., but was returned to the CIC when that business decided not to pick up the option.