LAKE PLACID — A planned rise in some parking rates, discussion of extended parking enforcement hours and stories of overzealous parking enforcement in Lake Placid last month triggered a flood of community feedback — and pushback — about the village’s parking situation.

The Lake Placid Village Board of Trustees will meet at 4:45 p.m. tonight for a public hearing on the proposed extension of parking enforcement hours. Under the proposed extension, paid parking would be enforced from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Monday through Saturday and from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Sunday.

Village Trustee Marc Galvin and Treasurer Mindy Goddeau said Thursday that village leadership is eager to hear about parking firsthand from locals anytime — not just at public hearings.

“Come and talk to us, just let us know (when there are parking issues). Because we can’t fix a situation or explain a situation until we know about it,” Goddeau said. She added that people with concerns about parking should reach out to village Clerk Anita Estling, who can point them to the right person to talk to.

“We would love more visitors at board meetings, as long as it’s productive conversation,” Galvin added. “We welcome that.”

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Rate equalization

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The village’s current Flowbird meters were installed in January 2020 and charge a rate of $2 per hour. Previously, a handful of meters at the municipal lot charged $1 per hour, while the rest charged $2. The village board voted in March to make this change, which took effect on June 19.

Galvin said 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.

“It was just to make it consistent because it was confusing,” he said. “The village does get the benefit of paid parking. It goes into the general fund and it helps (Goddeau) keep the budget under the 2% tax cap.”

The rate changes only happened in one lot — the rest of the village’s rates remained the same $2. Goddeau said that these changes are “right in line” with comparable tourist towns and cities, adding that she did not agree with characterizations of the village government as “greedy” on social media.

“If we were greedy, we would’ve gone over the tax cap (in the budget) a long time ago,” she said. “And, as far as prices for parking, we pay $2 an hour. Lake George is $2 an hour. We’re very similar in nature. As far as ticket prices, parking tickets, go to New York City — those are tiered.”

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Enforcement hours

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Paid parking is currently enforced from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Monday through Saturday and from 1 to 6 p.m. on Sunday in Lake Placid. At its June 17 meeting, the village board discussed the possibility of extending those hours from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Monday through Saturday and 1 to 8 p.m. on Sunday.

The biggest reason Lake Placid has paid parking and why the board is considering extending enforcement hours, Galvin said, is to spur turnover in the coveted spots on Main Street.

“Making money to the general fund is a benefit of paid parking, but the real reason for paid parking is to regulate a finite resource. Everyone knows we have a parking capacity issue in Lake Placid,” he said.

Currently, residents, employees and business owners on Main Street have a habit of parking in a spot in the late afternoon and “camping out” all evening, Galvin said, making parking harder for the tourists and customers who bring money to the town.

“We’re not trying to push residents out. … You’re not as likely to move your car if parking’s not being enforced or regulated and you don’t have to pay for it,” he said. “That’s where parking regulation comes in. It’s really to benefit the businesses on Main Street.”

Goddeau said that keeping Main Street businesses up and running benefits all residents in the long-term, keeping their property tax rates lower than they would be without businesses helping out.

“The businesses pay the vast majority of our taxes,” she said. “The hotels pay a huge portion of our property taxes, which keeps us able to keep the tax rate low for locals.”

There are two varieties of parking passes available that can help locals avoid feeding the meter when they visit Main Street.

Main Street employees and residents are eligible for $200 annual parking permits that allow them to park at designated parking spots around Main Street all day without feeding the meter. This rate comes out to paying about 50 cents a day for parking — the equivalent of 15 minutes of metered parking — if the passholder parked on Main Street every day of the year. This permit is administered by the Lake Placid Police Department and must be renewed every year. It’s only available to those who live or work on Main Street, and does not give passholders free rein over all metered spots — there are designated Main Street spots and lots in which they can park.

“We’re trying to make it easier for (residents and employees) to obtain a permit,” Goddeau said. “You’ve still got to buy a permit, because we still have to produce revenue to take care of the lots and pay the employees to take care of the lots and repave the lots.”

The village also offers a resident parking pass, which is free for all people who own property or are registered to vote in Lake Placid and it is valid for two years. Passholders can park in metered spaces on Main Street from 7 to 11 a.m. at no charge. This pass is administered through the North Elba town clerk’s office.

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App

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The village’s Flowbird meters allow people to pay for parking either at the meter or via the connected app. In March, village Trustee Jackie Kelly said that the village aims to lower parking fees on the app to encourage more people to use it. Parking rates are currently the same $2 per hour across physical meters and the app, but the app adds an additional 35-cent fee to transactions, making it the more expensive option of the two as of Sunday.

The main benefits of using the app over the physical meters, Goddeau said, is that the app will send a reminder when the meter is about to run out, allowing people to re-up their meter without getting up from their movie or dinner.

In the past month, however, the app has experienced some glitches.

Meters in the village are supposed to offer free parking for 15 minutes to anybody. While the physical meters have been updated to reflect this change and typically offer the free 15 minutes, the app will only tack the free 15 minutes on to a paid parking period. Goddeau said this is an issue with the Flowbird app’s platform that the company is working to fix.

“The meter is functioning with the free 15 minutes,” she said. “With the app, for some reason, they put it on the back end of it instead of the front end of it, and we’re having some issues. But it is a Flowbird, across the board, issue.”

The free 15 minutes is one of the village’s attempts to make Main Street an easier experience for locals, Goddeau added.

“We’re trying to be more accessible for the locals because we all get it. I avoid Main Street sometimes because I know I’m not going to find a parking spot,” she said.

As of Sunday, the app also displays the new proposed enforcement hours — 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and 1 to 8 p.m. — even though they have not been passed by the village board. Goddeau said 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.”

If the meter hour changes are not passed by the village board, Goddeau said the village will pay to change the enforcement hours back on the app.

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Enforcement

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Lake Placid has created several new parking enforcement positions in recent years, currently employing two full-time and one part-time parking enforcement officers. As they’ve filled out the enforcement team, ticketing has become more common and some residents claim to have been unfairly ticketed.

Goddeau said that enforcement is “being fine-tuned.” In some instances, there is a delay between the Flowbird meters and app and parking enforcement officers that may make it look like a meter hasn’t been paid when it actually has. This delay has been observed to last anywhere from 30 seconds to 12 minutes, Goddeau said.

“We are working with the enforcement app to update their platform so it will be … way faster than it currently is,” she said.

Other enforcement complains surround parking in loading zones. In a June 26 letter to the editor, Keene Valley resident Sarah Doyle said that she had received a parking ticket for parking in a loading zone outside her sister’s Main Street shop for four minutes to load and unload products for her sister. Doyle said she tried to pay at the meter, but it was not working — this was June 19, or Juneteenth, the day that the meters were set to update to reflect rate changes. Doyle parked at 1:31 p.m. and was issued a ticket at 1:33 p.m.

“There has been some conversation with the parking enforcement officer with regards to what happened and giving people a little more leeway to do things,” Goddeau said.

Goddeau added that, while the village does issue parking tickets on holidays, as the police department is open on holidays, Doyle successfully appealed her ticket on the grounds that she was actively loading and unloading products at a Main Street business. Current parking regulations say that only vehicles with commercial plates can park in a loading zone, but the village board is looking to change the wording, as many business owners on Main Street don’t have commercial plates.

“The commercial plate thing doesn’t really work in practice,” Galvin said.

Galvin said that, recently, a truck with commercial plates camped out in a Main Street loading zone from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Meanwhile, as a business owner on Main Street, a vehicle that Galvin occasionally uses to load and unload products does not have a commercial plate. He said he’s had to talk with enforcement officers about using the non-commercial vehicle to load and unload before.

The village board will likely alter the language around loading zones to allow any vehicles participating in “active loading and unloading” to temporarily park there, Galvin said.

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Parking garage

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The village has been looking to build a parking garage on Main Street for years to alleviate congestion. In practice, it’s difficult to get the project off the ground, Goddeau said.

She said that the village has explored building a lot at the upper and lower NBT Bank lot, which is located in the middle of Main Street across from Big Mountain Deli, as well as at the large municipal lot next to the Lake Placid Olympic Center. There have been significant hurdles at both locations.

“We don’t own the municipal lot,” Goddeau said. “The Lussi family owns the vast majority of it and the town owns a small chunk of it. We have a life lease on it, which is why we can charge for parking there. We maintain it, we take care of it, the whole nine yards. We can’t apply for grants or anything to put anything on that lot because we don’t own it.”

Meanwhile, upper and lower NBT lots are a question of funding and space — though the village acquired more of the land surrounding the lot in 2017, there’s still not enough to support a functional garage.

“There is a home up behind it, that’s a portion of what we’re dealing with. There’s a home off to the side of it. We need a certain amount of property to do it, which would require us to acquire some additional property,” Goddeau said. “We did acquire a sliver that we needed, which helped us with the redesign when we did Main Street, but there’s still addition (land), and you’re dealing with property owners. They know you need that piece of property, so it’s not cheap.”

When the village got quotes on a parking garage for the NBT lot around 2022, the project carried a price tag of $11 million, almost $4 million higher than the village’s total budget for 2024. While grants are available, Goddeau said, they become less realistic when the “useful life” of the garage is factored in.

“When you go out for a bond or you go out for a grant, there are time parameters in which you can expense those things over because of useful life. When we spoke with the last company that quoted us out for (the garage), it was a steel-beam structure, and they said ‘You would be replacing steel beams and part of the infrastructure before you paid it off.’ So, the useful life was not going to be long enough, so we would have to go do it again and do it again,” she said.

The village is still regularly having conversations about a garage and plans to go requote it, but the price tag isn’t likely to have come down much in two years, according to Goddeau.

“There’s a lot of moving parts. We’re aware of the situation. We’re aware that we are short on parking. It’s an ongoing conversation,” she said. “We’re open to hearing people’s thoughts on how we can rectify it. I’m always open to talking to someone about, ‘Hey, you have this idea, let’s hash it out. Let’s see if we can make it work.'”

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History

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Parking meters have long been a source of public debate in Lake Placid. They were first considered in the 1930s, with a July 1938 article in the Lake Placid News titled “No solution found here for parking problem” reporting “each year (meters are) a subject of discussion at meetings and as yet no suitable solution has been found.”

Meters were eventually installed in 1951 and originally charged a nickel per hour of parking, the standard rate at the time. Their installation was not without its detractors — the Lake Placid News reported in 1953 that locals often refused or neglected to pay parking fees once tourist season ended.