Council Formalizes Parking Changes

OCEAN CITY — Public parking in Ocean City likely got a lot more efficient and perhaps a little more expensive this week after resort officials passed a resolution setting the new fees and fines associated with the implementation of a new system.

Last month, the Mayor and Council approved a new state-of-the-art parking payment and enforcement system for the streets and municipal lots in the downtown area to the tune of nearly $600,000. The new system utilizes license plate reader technology and will result in a switch from the current “pay and display” system to a “pay by plate” system.

On Tuesday, the Mayor and Council passed a resolution formalizing the new fees and fines associated with parking on the resort’s streets, municipal lots and the Inlet lot. The resolution passed with no discussion after the council and staff hashed out many of the issues still to be resolved with the new License Plate Reader (LPR) system in a marathon session last month.

Visitors and residents will still park wherever they find open spaces on the streets and municipal lots in the downtown area and visit a nearby kiosk to make payment arrangements for their desired time periods. However, instead of printing a receipt to be displayed on the dashboard of their vehicle, they will enter their license plate information. Parking enforcement officials will then be able to scan the vehicle’s license plate to determine if they have paid for parking and are not expired.

Currently, the fine for an expired parking meter on the streets or in the municipal lots other than the Inlet lot is $15 if it is paid within 48 hours and $25 if paid after 48 hours. The $15 early fine and the $25 fine after 48 hours has been eliminated in favor of a flat $50 fine. However, a customer will arrive back at his or her vehicle, discover the meter has expired and a ticket has been issued. The customer can than pay for overage at a kiosk or by phone, thereby voiding the parking ticket.

Initially, the grace period for simply paying for the parking overage and voiding the ticket was set at four hours. However, after considerable debate in January, the council voted to reduce the grace period to just one hour. The thinking is someone who went to the beach or out to dinner and overran his or her parking meter payment by an hour could benefit from the grace period and the good will that comes from avoiding a parking ticket, while not allowing a customer to park four hours for free and wait to see if they got a ticket.

Perhaps the biggest changes with the new system will come at the Inlet parking lot, where the traditional gated system will be replaced with a combination of LPRs at the entrance and exit to the lot and the new kiosks where residents and visitors can pay for parking.

The resolution passed by the council on Tuesday raises the hourly fee at the Inlet lot to a flat $3 from April 1 to Oct. 31. Currently, the rate is $2 per hour in the shoulder seasons and $3 per hour in the peak seasons from Memorial Day to Labor Day. With the new LPR system, the hourly rate at the Inlet lot will be $3 across the board.

Another change included in the resolution is how customers will pay for parking at the Inlet lot. With the fully-automated LPR system, if customers don’t pay to park using the kiosks or the app on their mobile phones, the LPRs will read their tags when they enter and when they exit and the time a vehicle spent on the lot will be calculated.

Those customers will then be sent through the mail a bill for the number of hours in the lot times the new rate of $3 per hour plus a $25 administrative fee. If the customer does not pay the bill within a prescribed amount of time, it then becomes a parking ticket.

About The Author: Shawn Soper

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Shawn Soper has been with The Dispatch since 2000. He began as a staff writer covering various local government beats and general stories. His current positions include managing editor and sports editor. Growing up in Baltimore before moving to Ocean City full time three decades ago, Soper graduated from Loch Raven High School in 1981 and from Towson University in 1985 with degrees in mass communications with a journalism concentration and history.