Parking rates increase, new system to be implemented in Ferndale

FERNDALE — New parking rates have been implemented in the city of Ferndale as of July 1.

The new parking rates are $1.60 per hour for on-street parking spaces, $1.35 for surface lots and $1.25 for The dot parking structure. Previously, the parking rates were $1.50 per hour for on-street parking spaces, $1.25 for surface lots and $1.15 for The dot.

Parking will remain free on Sundays and 14 holidays throughout the year.

City Manager Joe Gacioch said there are three drivers for the rate increase, the city’s first since 2021.

The first driver, he said, was the cost of business and keeping up with the increase in the unit costs for the system. The second driver was to improve customer service and streamline the system, and the third is the “annual debt service requirements for the term of the repayment period, and that’s about $1.1 million per year.”

“You project your costs. Through the budget process, we look at our cost structures,” Gacioch stated. “For example, concrete, the cost of concrete, which we use for resurfacing, that’s increased by about 50% since 2021. As we understand, we have a capital plan. We project out our construction needs for improving surface lots or improving other areas, and we take that into factor. You project your revenues based on your trends. And then, of course, we include our strategic priorities like these customer service improvements.”

In addition to the recent increase, Ferndale also is planning to make a change to the way that customers park downtown later this year.

Currently, customers pay for parking on a mobile app or by kiosk by inputting a space number. The space number system will be removed, and customers instead will pay by putting in their license plate number, a similar system to one used in Detroit.

“The license plate is tied to a zone that you are in,” Bruce Campbell, general manager of Park Ferndale, said. “There will be much fewer signs and you’ll have signs with zones on them, and what people will do is if they have the app, they’ll have their license plate in the app, all they’ll do is plug in the zone that they park in to the app the same way they do a space right now. It’s the same process and then, depending on where they park, the rate will come up and they’ll make the payment.”

Campbell noted that parking on Woodward will be a bit different, as the city is not planning on having kiosks on the road.

“Woodward is planned to be a mobile payment zone where people will either use the app to pay, or they’ll use text to pay, or they can go to the nearest kiosk. So it’s not like they can’t use the kiosk. We just won’t have any on Woodward,” he said. “With the new configuration of Woodward, I think the most consecutive parking spaces we have is right there in front of Anita’s Kitchen. I think there’s eight spaces. … It really doesn’t make economic sense to put kiosks in those areas where the utilization won’t be high enough to justify putting a kiosk there.”

The city plans to change the parking system sometime after Labor Day.

“It’ll work the same as the rest of the system, where there will be signs up that will have a zone number on them and people will be able to either use the app to pay or pay by text, or again, there are kiosks near most of those places,” Gacioch said. “We think it simplifies the process for drivers, as well as making it more efficient from a management standpoint for operations.”