Mayor Joe Ganim announced on Friday a suspension on parking meter fees Downtown to spur local business through Labor Day.
“In order to give customers and businesses a break and some support in the Downtown area, government has stepped up on a local level to waive parking meters all summer,” says Ganim in a statement. “It’ll be a financial hit for the City but nothing compared to the financial hit businesses have taken in trying to get through this pandemic. At a time when everyone has added a list of safety precautions and regulations to their daily operations, we will continue to do what we can to remove any hurdles that may impact customer and business experiences.”
Parking meter info can be found here, https://bridgeportct.gov/parkingmeters with a map of meter locations here: http://bridgeportparking.com/meter-location-map.pdf.
For a complete list of reopened Downtown businesses visit https://infobridgeport.com/.
This is only a temporary move and I will now start going downtown but I do see an issue, what will happen to Little Stevie A, will he be furlough without pay?
Don’t want to see anyone lose their job right now, but Ron brings up a good point, why are we paying a parking enforcement employee when there isn’t a need for enforcement this summer??
Harvey and Ron…………….
Far be it for me to defend Steve A……..BUT there is parking enforcement and ticketing for things other than meters.
Parking in a no parking/standing zone
Parking in a Handicap space a permit
Parking to close to a Hydrant
Parking too close to the corner
Parking in a loading zone
and the list goes on……………………………
There is revenue to be made up from the loss of meters
A competent Parking Enforcement Officer would step up enfoicement of all the other parking rules. He can’t count on the meters to give automatic violation notices and photograph the offending cars.
Lay him off!
Lay him off!
Lay him off!
Lay him off!
👏 👏 👏
No money coming in from parking meters,
No money going out for salaries.
Marshal Marcus, you said, “A (competent) Parking Enforcement Officer would step up enforcement of all the other parking rules. You know that doesn’t include little Stevie Blunder.
Lay Him Off!
Gee, it’s the weekend so Little Stevie A is able to post on OIB but not a word from Stevie. That’s Stevie job, to bring in money in from parking.
This is a joke! The downtown has recently lost several (of the handful) of remaining businesses in the downtown… The art-supply shop — that provided such a positive presence and appeared as such a positive development for the downtown — is the first of the recently-departed downtown businesses that come to mind. But that business closed before the COVID crisis, so that can only be attributed to the fecklessness and incompetence of the City’s economic-development department… (The cessation of street-parking charges could only have helped that Main Street business early in its tenure — around the same time that downtown street- parking was brought into the “arsenal” of “innovative” revenue solutions needed to support the Administration’s patronage payroll…) (Other downtown businesses also closed during the past 12 months, pre-COVID… While others sought to sell and couldn’t — and will probably close during the crisis. Let’s hope that they successfully change hands and are kept open with new new energy…)
In any event, the downtown is essentially dead. (Sorry. Just the facts…) Removing metered, municipal parking fees, at this point in time, for downtown Bridgeport, is akin to removing medicinal leeches from a dead person that had been undergoing folk-remedy treatment for anemia — the latter situation essentially describing Bridgeport’s municipal, economic development policy/practices…
This city is about as sick as any municipality can get and could wind-up in the state’s sights for disincorporation. It seems as if the Ganim Administration is about as clueless about this as the Bucci Administration had been (or pretended to be) in 1988… With Ken Flatto at the helm of the City’s finances, it seems that he must be employing extraordinary book-cooking skills to hide this from other city employees, the public, and the media… (A clue, in this regard, for all interested parties, might be the City’s laughable COVID-crisis tax-payer relief policy — LOW-INTEREST LATE-PENALITIES — as “relief” for strapped tax payers!
The next months will see lots of Bridgeport bankruptcies and “set” insurance-claim fires of Bridgeport residential and business properties…
But don’t worry. The downtown parking fees will be remain abated…
Is there anything downtown that’s worth feeding a meter for? Maybe it depends on the time of day BUT- In an effort to stimulate business, and because now one can park and save maybe 1 or 2 whole dollars, Ron “will now start going downtown.” Hallelujah!