The days of scrounging through cup holders and footwells in search of coins for the parking meter will soon be history in Nashville.
A bill that will modernize Nashville’s curbside parking, proposed by District 34 Councilmember Angie Henderson, passed on third reading at this week's Metro Council meeting. The bill outlines a management agreement with private company LAZ Parking Georgia, which would install and manage smart parking meters. Users could pay with their phones, credit cards or cash.
“The current parking meter system is outdated and, according to previous studies, operating at only 10 percent efficiency,” says Mayor John Cooper in a statement. “Our new parking program will modernize meters and vastly improve the user’s experience. … These new efficiencies represent a major step forward toward improving aging city infrastructure — a core goal of my administration — and will generate significant revenues that will be reinvested into our parking operations and maintenance moving forward.”
While the bill passed by a comfortable margin, mayoral candidate and District 19 Councilmember Freddie O’Connell pushed back, citing concerns over the idea of privatizing parking.
“The most successful thing the mayor accomplished [Tuesday] night was creating the illusion that this was in fact not parking privatization,” O’Connell tells the Scene. While O’Connell supports the modernization of parking, he doesn’t think going private is the way to do it. “I think when you're involved in an enforcement process of a public pricing mechanism, it really ought to be public employees that are accountable to them.”
Back in 2019, a similar bill failed in the Metro Council. Mayor Cooper, an at-large councilmember at the time, opposed the bill, which was sponsored by O’Connell. O’Connell says he was a default sponsor because of his position as chair of the Metro Public Works Committee. He voted yes on the 2019 bill's first reading.* He says the mayor’s 2019 position on the move to privatization was correct.
“The 2019 proposal relinquished control of valuable infrastructure for 30 years or more, eliminated the incentive for clean-technology vehicles, and importantly, allowed a private company to collect the parking revenue, rather than paying a company for their services like Metro does any other vendor,” says mayoral adviser and spokesperson TJ Ducklo. “It’s curious members of the vocal minority opposing [Tuesday] night’s bill on the grounds of ‘privatization’ would prefer the 2019 version.” Ducklo also expressed gratitude to the Metro Council for passing the bill in his statement to the Scene.
There will be a grace period during which warnings will be issued for failure to pay parking fees instead of actual legal penalties. Metro Council discussion centered on the fact that following this grace period, the city will be able to better monitor and enforce parking requirements with the new meters and help from LAZ Parking Georgia.
Correction: This post initially noted that O'Connell abstained from voting on the 2019 parking privatization bill, when he in fact voted yes. We apologize for the error.
