Summer paid parking coming to downtown Saint Joseph

SAINT JOSEPH, Mich. -- The city of Saint Joseph is shifting to paid parking on its downtown streets for the summer months starting in 2025.

The now free street parking and parking lots west of Main Street will transition to paid parking come May 1 and last until Sep. 30 each year.

All on-street parking will have a three-hour time limit for two dollars an hour, and the lot parking will shift to all-day one dollar parking.

City Manager for Saint Joseph, Emily Hackworth, explained this project began with the idea to help clear the summer parking congestion. The city hopes it will help incentivize people to park on the city’s east side, which will remain free.

“It is really all about incentivizing that decision-making and getting people sort of balanced out, so that there is more capacity and there is more turnover for the businesses downtown,” explained Hackworth.

Hackworth went on to say that while the focus is on decongesting the downtown summer parking, the city will get revenue from this project. She explained that money will be put back into the downtown area.

“That said, one of the benefits is that there will be some money in, you know, the cities pocket, dedicated to the downtown. That money will be dedicated to reinvesting in the downtown area. We know our parking lots need attention. We would love to do some more landscaping; you know we really need to beautify the downtown. It’s beautiful as it is, but it could certainly benefit from a little bit more investment and so there will be some resources available to do that,” said Hackworth.

While one local business owner, Kellye Wilson, explained she believes that will pull money away from the local businesses. She expressed she’s worried that her downtown business, Perennial Accents, could be harmed by the paid parking.

“I also firmly believe that there’s a set amount of money that comes into Saint Joe in the summer and they’re going to pull out their million dollars is what they project to make for parking. That’s a million dollars less that’ll go into businesses here, and so that’s less money that we have to sustain us through those nine months that we don’t have the big influx of out-of-town guests,” said Wilson.

Wilson went on to explain that she and several other locals have voiced their concerns, and she feels the city is not listening.

“It breaks my heart a little bit and I’m highly disappointed in our leadership in the city. Highly disappointed, because we have been vocal, we have told them repeatedly, we have given opportunities to discuss and they’re just simply not interested,” said Wilson.

While Hackworth says the city is focused on hearing the community’s concerns, saying the city staff Parking Subgroup is working to adjust the ordinance before it is officially submitted ahead of May 1st.

“This is not an overnight effort, this is many years in the works and again something we really don’t take lightly, and so we’re trying to turn over every stone. Making sure we’re thinking about as much as we can and one of the things we’ve done is we’ve established it in a way that it’s meant to be nimble, so if we find that we have a challenge, ideally, we can hopefully make tweaks to try to correct them,” said Hackworth.

She also explained that the next public meeting that will address the paid parking has not been scheduled yet, awaiting the Parking Subgroup to develop some additional changes to the parking plan, and will set that date once they have updated recommendations to give to the City Commission.