SANDPOINT — The city has put the brakes on its plan for paid on-street parking after it received overwhelmingly negative feedback during a question-and-answer event with downtown business owners Monday.

Community and Planning Development Jason Welker told the Daily Bee that the city will instead shift it focusing on increasing enforcement of the existing time limits on spaces. The idea of enforcing time limits was brought up by several business owners, who vastly preferred the idea to the proposed paid parking and dynamic pricing model. 

“The feedback I got was to focus on enforcement, so that’s what we are going to do,” Welker said. “We were there to listen and we did.” 

Welker said that the city is pivoting from meters to examining how technology can be used to help identify which cars are parked over the time limit. The city cannot chalk tires or use any license plate recognition software, due to Idaho Code, which has made enforcement of the limits difficult in the past. 

Increasing enforcement means there will likely be an increased police presence downtown, Welker said. He said the city recognizes that it hasn’t done a good job enforcing the time limits and that it will be a focus going forward. 

The city is still proposing paid off-street parking, Welker said. That aspect of the paid parking proposal was received much better by the business' owners, many said they see the need for people using those facilities, like City Beach, to pay to maintain them. 

Welker said that implementation of the proposal is still undecided at this time, with final decisions being made by the City Council at upcoming meetings. However, at the meeting he said the city is expecting a summer 2026 rollout. 

The decision to scrap the plan for paid on-street parking in some areas follows the question-and-answer meeting with the downtown business owners, who said the plan would have driven shoppers away from the area.  

Leilani Williams, executive director of the Downtown Sandpoint Business Association, said after the meeting that the owners felt that the former parking plan would have reflected poorly on the city and business owners. 

"For every negative comment you need 10 positive comments to bring people back down, so, if you put these meters in and charging them to come downtown, they’re not going to come,” Williams said after the meeting. 

Also included in the former proposal was the use of dynamic pricing and seasonal implementation of paid on-street parking. The city had planned to use dynamic pricing to help it achieve its desired occupancy rates of around 80-85%, Welker said at the meeting.  

Downtown business owners were also critical of that aspect, saying they’d prefer no paid parking at all than a seasonal implementation. They expressed concern of a slippery slope that would lead to the entirety of the on-street parking downtown becoming paid, despite Welker saying the city has no plans for that. 

Mayor Jeremy Grimm said at the meeting that the paid lots will have electronic signs in front of them to inform people on how many spots are open. Business owners expressed interest in better signage to communicate which parking is free, which Welker said city staff would include in their plan to council. 

Welker said that the city will continue listening to feedback on the plan but acknowledged that usage rates of parking spaces are still an issue the city is focused on addressing.  

The next step for the parking proposal is for the city to issue a request for qualifications so companies can submit their plans to the city. Welker said that the RFQ is planned to be out within the next couple of weeks, but it will take around two to three months before a vendor is chosen.