A meter parking enforcement hours sign is seen here on Main Street in Lake Placid on Sunday morning. (Enterprise photo — Sydney Emerson)

LAKE PLACID — The Lake Placid Village Board of Trustees will vote today on proposed parking enforcement hour changes, which, if passed, would extend parking enforcement hours from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Monday through Saturday and 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Sunday. All signs — road signs, that is — are pointing to an approval by the board despite pushback from residents at a hearing last month.

Ahead of today’s vote, signs with the new enforcement hours — reading “Meter parking, pay here 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.” — have already been installed above some Main Street meters. The exact day they were installed is not clear. Village police Chief Chuck Dobson said on Sunday that he couldn’t give an exact date, but confirmed the signage was changed by Flowbird meter technicians who came to work on the machines recently who were told that the enforcement hours change was coming.

Dobson acknowledged that the sign changes were preemptive, as the village board had not yet passed the local law changing the enforcement hours when the signs were installed.

“It ended up being premature,” he said.

He added that, though the signs and meters have read “8 a.m. to 8 p.m.,” village police and parking enforcement officers have not been enforcing before 9 a.m. or after 6 p.m.

The Flowbird app and parking meters already displayed the proposed new metered hours as of June 19, the day that the parking fees were equalized. Village Treasurer Mindy Goddeau told the Enterprise on June 20 that the enforcement hours displayed on the app were an attempt to save the village some money, as the village is charged every time it makes changes to Flowbird’s meter information. The village decided to change the rates and hours at the same time to avoid being charged twice, she said.

“We had four or five updates we needed done,” she said. “We paid for it all at once to save some money.”

Goddeau added that, if the board ultimately voted against the new hours, the village would pay to change the enforcement hours back on the app.

Village Mayor Art Devlin indicated on Sunday that the new signs agree with the way that the board is going to vote today.

“That’s the direction we’re going,” he said.

He added that he knew the village’s police and highway departments have been working together on signage for the meters “to make things more user-friendly.”

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A month of debate

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The village board proposed the parking enforcement hour changes at its June 17 meeting, saying at the time that Main Street business owners, employees and residents habitually park in the scarce Main Street parking spots shortly before enforcement hours end at 6 p.m. and then “camp out” in the spots for the remainder of the evening, especially during dinner service at local restaurants. Extending parking enforcement hours, the board said, would increase turnover in these spots.

Devlin further explained the board’s reasoning at a July 1 public hearing.

“Spots on Main Street, what we really want is people that want to go shop in the stores, go to restaurants, go to the movie theater, that kind of thing. … That’s not what we’re getting a lot of the time, and that’s really the reason we have the (metered parking),” he said at the hearing. “It’s really to make it fair. We have employees of stores or owners of stores that are just pulling in and parking at the end of our parking hours and taking all the spaces.”

At the hearing, public comments from Lake Placid and North Elba residents generally veered away from the proposed hours themselves and instead focused on the board’s stated reasoning behind the changes.

The board elected not to vote on the proposed enforcement hour changes after the public hearing, as village trustees Marc Galvin and Andrew Quinn were not present at the meeting. Though the board had a quorum, Devlin said he wanted to give Galvin and Quinn the opportunities to review comments made at the hearing and to cast their votes.

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Other parking changes

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The village has made other parking changes this summer. On June 19, parking rates were equalized across Main Street in an attempt to make parking less confusing, Galvin told the Enterprise on June 27. The large municipal lot next to the Lake Placid Olympic Center saw rates go from $1 to $2 to an hour, while the rest of the village’s lots and spots remained the same at $2 an hour. The village board voted in March to make this change.

Galvin said in June the village board’s main reason for equalizing the lots’ rates was uniformity. Though the village does get some financial rewards, money wasn’t the main reason for rate changes. While the state takes a small percentage of parking fees from Main Street because it is a state road, the rest of the fees from Main Street — as well as the fees from the parking lots — goes into the village’s general fund.

The village meters were also recently updated to offer free 15-minute parking. To get 15 minutes of parking free to run an errand on Main Street, people will still need to go to the meter and punch in their license plate number, after which, they’ll be prompted to print a free 15-minute ticket or insert their credit card to pay for a longer parking period. This feature currently does not work correctly on the Flowbird app, where it will only tack the free 15 minutes on to a paid hour of parking.