Burlington parking no longer a police issue; rather, it’s customer service
Burlington VT Dec 16 2020
Cars park along King Street in Burlington, where parking issues are no longer police matters. Instead, the Department of Public Works has taken them on. File photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
After the Burlington City Council voted to move parking responsibilities from the Police Department to the Public Works Department, the first change was a no-brainer, said Jeff Padgett, director of parking and traffic for the Burlington city government.
The city has changed the division’s name from “parking enforcement” to “parking services.” The name change is emblematic of the city’s efforts to move parking services out of the police department.
“It’s a culture shift in and of itself to go from something that’s called enforcement, which is sort of aggressive, to something called customer service, which you say with a smile on your face,” Padgett said.
The council voted for the change in November, as part of a larger push led by Progressives and Black activists over the past six months to shift funding and responsibilities away from police.
Parking is the first service to undergo a fundamental change as a result of the reorganization.
“Right now, if you want to buy a permit to park downtown, that’s one group; if you want a permit to park on your street, you go to a different group; if you get a parking ticket, you go to police,” Padgett said. “It’s not a mess, but it’s not linear. It’s not an easy place for customers to go.”
The shift to the Department of Public Works is broken down into three phases. In the first phase, the parking services budget and administrative structure was moved on paper from one department to the other.
In phases two and three, the department will integrate operations and infrastructure, figuring out what spaces people will work out of, what phone lines to use, and how employees might be best utilized.
Parking has 35 full-time employees, including seven or eight currently located at the police station. It also has about 50 part-time employees who work seasonally as crossing guards and line painters.
“This is a pretty big deal. It will affect nearly 100 employees,” Padgett said.
The city will also look to right-size the department, and he believes that can be done without any layoffs. The focus will be on making sure people are in the right positions, doing the work that makes the most sense.
“People deserve a peaceful parking experience,” Padgett said. “It’s not something people should jump up and down about, and it’s not something people should complain about, parking should just happen.”
It can be counterintuitive for people to think of parking as customer service, Padgett said, since many people just associate it with something negative, like getting parking tickets or getting towed. But he said all those negative things happen to better serve the customers.
“If you park downtown and overstay your meter and get a ticket, you may say, ‘That’s some customer service,’ but the reality is, it’s customer service not for the customer standing in front of us, but for the person coming down the street who will be the next customer,” Padgett said.
Even before issues of racism and policing came to the forefront in Burlington, it seemed incongruous for parking services to fall under the purview of the police, Patchett said.
“When I started the job (in 2019), I asked, ‘Is this normal?’ and people told me that it’s not abnormal,” Padgett said. A number of cities have a similar multi-agency system. “But there are many major municipalities where their parking enforcement is in the same place as meters and garages.”
Parking services will still have the power to enforce city ordinances through parking tickets. Police will be needed for towing, and FBI security clearances needed to look up license plate data.
Chapin Spencer, director of public works, said his department is reaching out to the public with a survey, asking Burlingtonians what they want to see from the new parking system. So far, he said, only about 25 responses have been received — fewer than he’d like.
“I haven’t read them yet. I’m holding off until we get a critical mass of responses,” Spencer said. “I’ve heard from others we’ve gotten a couple of fairly aggressive messages that aren’t germane to what we’re doing, but I am sincerely interested in what people think.”
Spencer said that, when he came into the job in 2013, the only way to pay for parking was through coin-operated meters. Now meters accept credit cards, and you can even pay by phone.
The departmental restructuring won’t result in a change in parking rates. The focus will be on creating more efficient operations.
“This is a real opportunity, that was led by an unrelated issue, to look at shifting parking enforcement over to DPW, and it’s an opportunity we shouldn’t squander,” Spencer said. “We want to do this right.”
