All right.

Uh let's call tonight's uh uh April thirteenth, two thousand twenty-six uh town council work session in the first item on the discussion for tonight is the parking authority.

All right, good mayor and counsel.

Yes.

Oh, I forgot okay.

I have to do that first.

Okay.

Sorry, Mr.

Dentler.

I didn't realize he was joining, I'm sorry.

Uh Councilmember uh Kirchowski has requested to be electronically participate in tonight's work session from Bleesburg, Virginia.

For health reasons.

Do I have a motion to allow Mr.

Kirkowski to electronically participate?

We'll move.

Okay, Councilmember Steinberg, Councilmember Nacy, all in favor.

Opposed.

That passes six zero one.

All right.

All right, now Mr.

Michael.

Thank you.

Good evening, Mayor and Council.

Uh you would ask to have a work session discussion on parking authorities.

And so just wanted to kind of bring this back up as something we talked about several months ago prior to the budget and CIP discussions.

So we'll start out this evening with just a little bit of background to refresh all of our memories on the the parking authorities, what that means, and how the town came by having that authority to create one.

So by background here, uh, we have several town parking assets, as we've talked about many times in different forms.

One is our parking garage or town hall parking garage with around 360 parking spaces.

We have two public surface lots, the Liberty Lot and the Madison Lot.

The Madison Lot has about eighty-four spaces, the Liberty Lot has a hundred and six spaces, and then we have roughly a hundred and fifty on-street pay-to-park spaces that we manage through Park Mobile.

Our current parking operations, the management of that is distributed out over several different town departments, trying to maximize the efficiencies of the different departments that are involved with this.

Parking enforcement itself is handled through the police department.

They have flexible part-time staff, they're non-swarm police officers that handle all the parking enforcement on the street and in the garage and in our parking lots.

The garage maintenance and lot maintenance is managed by public works and capital projects.

So they'll do from time to time the major overhauls of the garage.

And you know, we're coming out of a major repair project here in our town hall garage with that concrete work that we've had.

We've had the top surface coating, and we'll be finishing up here this year later with some metal replacement.

And then we have parking management, which is the administrative and the financial side of things handled from our financial staff.

They're the ones that are issuing the permits, uh the long-term monthly permits and dealing with all the mechanical equipment from the contractor-vender side of things.

And then we have public work staff that handles the physical gates themselves and the electronic system.

So just this past week we had somebody overnight drive into the gate, and our public work staff came out after hours to make those repairs.

So it's a team effort to take care of that the different assets that we have.

Parking authorities in Virginia are allowed by the discretion of the General Assembly.

So as a Dillon Rill state, they have to grant the authority to a locality.

Virginia authorize Leesburg to have a parking authority back during the 2024 General Assembly session.

And this is something that the town had asked for as part of its legislative program.

And you'll recall this was done because at the time we were talking about that public-private partnership with the senior affordable housing concept over on the Liberty Lot.

And the applicant was very much interested in the lot but needed a lease longer than 40 years, and 40 years is a statutory limit for a local government to make a lease with a private entity.

So going with that parking authority route allows you that flexibility to exceed the 40-year limit.

What I did find out in doing the research when you all wanted to have this conversation is we have very few parking authorities in Virginia.

Some call themselves authorities, but truly they don't operate as an authority.

So one example is Lynchburg.

They say they're a parking authority, but really when I call the former manager there to learn more about their program, it's really something that operates more as an advisory commission, similar to what we would have here in Leesburg.

Winchester did have a full-fledged parking authority up until December of this past year when they did uh the council for the city did vote to eliminate the parking authority itself, and there was a number of things that you can read about if you Google that discussion that they had between their parking authority and the city government.

Parking authority uh creation.

I'll just tell you a little bit about how this is handled.

Localities can create them by the authority of a resolution passed by the governing body, so you as the council could pass a resolution creating the authority.

It does require a public hearing, and that requires the public notice requirements that you're familiar with.

You create this authority as a public body.

It's required to have a five-member board, and they serve in staggering terms.