Hey Denver, it's time for this bi-weekly meeting of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee of Denver City Council.

Join us for the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee starting now.

Good afternoon, everyone.

It is Wednesday, October 1st, 2025.

Welcome to the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

I'm Chris Hines.

I serve as vice chair of the committee.

So I am the lucky one or the uh the sucker who gets to chair the committee for today.

So the lucky one, I'll guess.

Um we have two briefings today, um, but before we get into them, uh let's uh uh let's go around the table with introductions.

Councilmember Flynn.

Um good afternoon, Kevin Flynn's Southwest Numbers District 2.

Lucky District 7.

And yeah, um, so uh since we have quorum, uh which is awesome, um uh we might as well uh go ahead with our um uh our first presentation.

Sure.

Well, thanks for having us.

I'm Cindy Patton.

I'm the chief operating officer for DOTI, the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure.

I brought a couple members of my team, Jesus Sierra, who runs um our meter shop, as well as Scott Burton, who runs our planning program within the curbside and planning team, or sorry, curbside and parking team.

So no one no one's a sucker when you get to start out the meeting talking about parking because it's one of everyone's favorite subjects.

So we really um have some great content for you to wake you up after lunch.

We were asked to come and talk a little bit about the extension requests that we have for the parking meter contract with IPS.

So I'm gonna go through that.

And I just want to uh clarification and apologize.

I said two briefings.

Um, there are there are two presentations, there are three action items.

So um, so there are two briefings, but these are uh votes.

So uh sometimes briefings mean there isn't a vote, but these are actually action items.

So, yes, we haven't we have an ask of you.

Um, so just to go through the agenda today, we're gonna talk about the contract amendment, what it is, um, and then just talk a little bit broader about what this unlocks for us and what we're planning in the parking management um programs here at Denver.

Um, this is one of my favorite pictures, so I always have to share it with you.

It is actually local.

You'll see the Brown Palace in the background.

And it is um, I I didn't know this, I looked it up today.

I've had this picture for years and years.

This is a patternoster, which is a mechanized parking garage.

I had never heard that team term before.

Um but uh you can see a bolt broke, which is why it has a crowd, and that car at the very top is uh precariously perched.

Um I don't know the outcome of this situation, but it is one of the great pictures of things that we tried in Denver to be creative.

That was on an off-street lot.

So this ask today is to approve a contract amendment with the IPS group, which adds um new capacity to that contract.

The IPS group provides our meter and pay station equipment, so the single space meters that you see on the street, predominantly downtown and in our commercial centers, as well as the pay stations.

Pay stations are multi-space meters.

They manage a number of different spaces.

You'll see those like in Cherry Creek, for example.

Um that contract also manages the the equipment maintenance.

So if we have repairs that are needed, we can send the that request over to IPS, and they will send new uh equipment for us to replace, and Jesus' team does that.

Um, and then it also offers us software system operations, which is really important because that's a lot of the analytic tools that we use to understand how many people are paying, and it's a proxy for what the occupancy and demand is at a particular location, what that utilization is.

It tells a story, what's happening at that curb.

So this will give us a couple new years for a new end date of 1031 2027.

And a little history, I'm not gonna go through this timeline.

I just think that it's uh an interesting story.

Um we first had parking meters all the way back in the late 30s, so this has been a long-standing way of managing parking here in Denver in certain areas that call for it.

We've always been very um interested in not having revenue drive this program, but having demand and the responsiveness to what is the best way to respond to activity uh and the land uses that are adjacent.

Because parking is all about opening up access at the curb, and that's quality of life.

Um, that's commercial success and business success.

It's it's not the revenue that's associated.

But you can see we went through some rate increases, some rate decreases and rating increases again.

Most recently in 2022.

And we did go from our old single space meters, which were Duncan meters that you had to manually program at the meter itself to smart meters in 2009.