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City Council Selects New Parking Management

Cedar Rapids, IA - At last night’s meeting, the City Council indicated their preference to move forward with the selection of a third party to manage the parking system. A majority of the Council spoke in favor of both moving management of the parking system to a third party (most likely Republic Parking) and to further exploration of parking as a tool to drive economic development. “This is a significant step in the right direction for our parking system,” said Downtown District Operations Director Vanessa Solesbee. “I was encouraged to hear several Council members acknowledge that we need to explore the best way to leverage our parking system to drive economic development.”

For the past six months, an ad-hoc committee of the Downtown District board met monthly to identify and solve for a variety of short and long term issues with the downtown parking system. This ad-hoc group unanimously supported the selection of Republic Parking as the new City parking manager. The City will work with Republic over the next few weeks to negotiate a contract that will allow existing City parking staff to remain in their jobs for a one year trial period. These City staff (about 8 employees) will be managed by Republic and during the next several months, Republic will assess whether additional staff will need to be added. Any additional staff would be recruited, hired and trained directly by Republic.

“Parking availability and ease of use are absolutely critical to the ability of our downtown business and property owners to recruit and maintain tenants,” said Solesbee. “Work to revitalize a parking system that is undeniably broken needs to begin immediately and the Council’s decision last night indicates that they are ready to partner with the Downtown District to make that happen.”