Council president Peter Wright and other members of the Homewood City Council wore face masks to the May 18 meeting. The council had in-person meetings throughout May, but participants were able to join the meeting on the Zoom app.
The city of Homewood could soon partner with parking professionals at Kimley-Horn to collect data and find solutions to the city’s downtown parking problems.
The Homewood City Council voted at its May 18 meeting to send the request for parking management system RFI to upcoming budget hearings for the 2021 budget.
Representatives from Kimley-Horn gave a presentation about the parking study at the Feb. 3 finance committee meeting.
“There is a need for data-driven understanding of parking,” said Jeffrey Elsey, an engineer with Kimley-Horn. “I think a lot of the complaints we hear and the concerns from our business owners and customers are a little bit anecdotal because there is a little bit of a lack of data.”
The parking study would be three different phases, Elsey said. Phase One is the discovery and data collection phase.
“We would go out and look at every single parking stall in a study area on an hourly basis for a period of one, two or three days, depending on how much data we want to collect,” he said.
There would also be targeted community outreach in this phase, such as focus groups and workshops.
Phase Two is the needs assessment phase. This looks at the existing issues that need to be addressed and projected growth.
Last, Phase Three of the study is “the fun part,” Elsey said — Kimley-Horn would give Homewood recommendations and an action plan in this phase. This plan could include solutions like building a new parking facility, restriping, realtime occupancy technologies, new signage or more.
Depending on the level of engagement, the study could take three to five months, Elsey said.
Because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the council decided to push this item to the 2021 budget instead of immediately entering an agreement with Kimley-Horn.
“Any expenditures we don’t need right now, we’re going to push to the budget hearings,” Councilman Andy Gwaltney said. There also aren’t as many people parking downtown as there were before the pandemic, so the study wouldn’t show its usual numbers, he added.