While the pause on paid parking in St. Joseph remains in place, downtown business owners are hoping city leaders are sincere about listening to their concerns and making changes to the program.
Ken Kozminski, owner of The Buck Burgers and Brew, has been among the merchants meeting with city leaders to bounce around ideas. He tells us the city may have spoken with some business owners about paid parking before it was implemented in May, but he doesn’t think it spoke to enough of them.
“I mean, this whole thing was put in wrong to begin with, if you will, especially when it comes to ADA and taking care of our handicapped and disabled people,” Kozminski said. “So it’s really, to me, it’s really not a pause. They’re on suspension until they get it right. And now’s our opportunity to figure out, where do we go from here?”
Kozminski says his own business went down 38% when the paid parking was in effect. He’s not totally against having some form of paid parking, but says there have got to be some adjustments that can be made so regular customers aren’t driven away.
Kozminski is hoping there’s no return of paid parking this year.
“But if we go right now and just rush in and try to throw this thing back in place, our summer really ends August 15. That’s when the summer ends. And then we have Labor Day weekend pretty much. And then now we’re back into where our locals, we need everybody back and we’ve run them all out of town right now.”
Kozminski says some proposals have included having season passes for sale to help the city generate revenue.
Paid parking has been suspended since June 9 because it was discovered some of the pay stations downtown weren’t ADA-compliant. Since then, downtown St. Joe has largely bloomed back to life.
