Changes are coming to street parking in parts of downtown Calgary next month and some area eateries are concerned it will impact their breakfast business.

On August 1st, most of the streets between 9th and 3rd Avenue and 1st and 8th Street S.W. will start charging for parking at 7:00 a.m.

City council approved the change in June and said the goal is to create more turn-over in high demand parking spaces, some of which are used overnight.

“People paying between 7 and 9 is happening in many areas already. This was an area that wasn’t. It’s a supply and demand proposition that we run our parking management system on. We were seeing a lot of this parking being used and in our constant efforts to get, especially on-street parking rotating, we decided to implement what actually is already seen in most of the rest of downtown,” said Evan Woolley, Ward 8 Councillor.

The city currently charges for parking in these areas from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. from Monday to Saturday and Calgary’s parking authority says this is the first time the hours have been extended to 7:00 a.m.

A number of restaurants have started serving breakfast early in the morning because customers are looking for more affordable options and some say the loss of free parking could drive people away.

“Breakfast is extremely important, especially in downtown, I mean, things get started here so people are downtown by 5, 6 in the morning and they start their days off at that time, they want some place to go for breakfast,” said Michael Ciccaglione, one of the proprietors of the Black Cat Lounge and Grill. “I’m worried a little bit about that because the parking downtown is minimal to begin with and people are very conservative about that so, kind of, a changing of the rules makes it even more of a challenge for people when they’re coming to downtown,”

Ciccaglione’s eatery opens at 6:30 a.m. and he says there are already fewer people downtown because of the downturn and one more fee might turn people off.

“It’s very, very important especially because there isn’t a lot of parking downtown to begin with so for them it’s just another payment, it’s another payment for them whereas before they used to be able to come, they would park in front, off to the side, whatever the case may be. They usually come for lunch for maybe a half an hour, 45 minutes, and it always helps when parking is free. Now? Not so much,” he said. “I understand the city has a mandate that they have to raise as much money as possible for their programs and things but the business community has taken a real, serious hit over the past, especially over the past two years and it’s not one of those things where you want to just continually kick them and kick them and expect them to keep paying and paying and paying.”

Maggie Schofield from the Calgary Downtown Association says it’s a surprising change that could push people out of the core.

“It was surprising mostly because businesses are already struggling, we’ve got a high vacancy rate downtown. We’re got less people down here because of the layoffs and so forth,” said Schofield. “They’re struggling already and it will probably push people out of downtown and we saw that happen when they did Saturday charges years ago and we never really recovered from that.”

The downtown association says there are about 20,000 fewer workers in the core since the end of 2014 and that it tried to convince city council to curb the parking change.

Councillor Wooley says he believes it’s good for business and that the initiative was not launched to fill a gap in revenue.

“We are looking at a whole series of initiatives to help us during this economic downturn in the City of Calgary, we know businesses are struggling, we have a zero percent tax freeze for this year, we’re looking at a whole number of different initiatives to help out and support our business community. The supply and demand, I would argue, in opposition to the Calgary Downtown Association, the more people that we can get popping in and out of businesses that are opening now earlier in the morning and get that traffic circulating, the better it will be for business,” he said. “We are seeing less people parking in certain locations and certain locations, like the one we’ve identified right now, parking is actually increasing. We are not using this as a stop-gap measure to fill a void, despite what some people, again, our technology and how parking happens, is based on supply and demand and we are seeing big, big increases in demand and we want to get traffic circulating, especially street traffic, circulating throughout the day, we’re seeing these fill up more in the day. If you’ve got to go and spend a few hours at a meeting, there’s a number of different opportunities and options for you to choose.”

The city says it will start installing the new signs on July 30th and hopes to have them all up by mid-August.

For more information on the Downtown Parking Strategy, click HERE.

(With files from Alesia Fieldberg)