Newport Mayor Jerry Peluso is so passionate about expanding the presence of parking meters on Monmouth Street that his tie matched his opinion on Monday night.

During the city commission's regular caucus meeting, Peluso stood before the crowd at the city building for an old school paper-and-marker presentation while wearing a tie with a parking meter on it.

He noted the development of Monmouth Row, the new apartment building in the central business district, and the likely future development of the parking lot across from the Syndicate. "Where are all the people gonna park?," he asked. "I'll tell you where. They're gonna come up Monmouth Street where it's free, then we're going to have a challenge. That's why we need to react and plan for the next three to five years down the road or we'll have all these businesses coming in and saying, What are you going to do about the parking situation?"

Currently, some businesses are on board while others are not. “I don't think it's a good idea,” said Jason Craig, owner of the C&D Record Bar on Monmouth, when asked by The River City News for an article on the topic last month. “It hurts us. I feel I lose sales sometimes because people are worried about meters. I think it's absolutely ludicrous that you have to pay to park.”

On Monday night, Beth Yutze, owner of Indoor Outdoor Aquatics, expressed her support. "We are one of the businesses that requested meters," she said. "We also happen to be a business at the bus stop. We had people pulling up in front of our store and getting on the bus every day. We are not a restaurant. We sell aquariums and pond supplies. Pond products can be twenty-five pounds, aquariums can be a few hundred pounds. You have to be able to load and unload."

"I'm one of the people that, if you park in front of my store, I will give you an hour. I will give you two hours. After two hours, I'm one of the people that calls the police. Without that, my business can't survive."

Mayor Peluso makes a financial case for the addition of meters on Monmouth Street south of Sixth Street and along some of the nearby side streets. He said that in the 1970s when Downtown Newport entered a period of decline, meters were removed as a way to entice shoppers to spend more time there. But since its revitalization, particularly after a streetscape project a dozen years ago, nearly every storefront is full. Whether to add meters to support the businesses is what Peluso called the $74,500 question.

Why that amount? It's the number of dollars that the mayor believes the city could collect from the additional meters and parking lots.

"What hurts business is the lack of parking, that's what will hurt a business," Peluso said. There are currently 325 meters in Newport which collected $151,839.78 cents last year. Tickets written for cars parked at expired meters amounted to $19,000. That puts an annual value of $325 on each meter, the mayor said. Add 119 new meters and 94 city parking spaces in lots and you can add nearly seventy-five grand, he said.

If possible, the money collected from increased parking enforcement would be used to maintain Monmouth Street's appearance.

The city will start with the placement of ten smart meters, which can accept credit cards, near Newport on the Levee and will evaluate the effectiveness and the performance. "Once we get through with the experiment and find how successful it's been, we may just decide to go ahead and buy the meters all at one time," City Manager Tom Fromme said.

Smart meters cost around $325 a pop, Mayor Peluso said, adding that based on his math they could be paid off within a year.

Before any long-term commitment to the meters, though, city leaders will maintain a dialogue with business owners and the community in person and online. "Hopefully people will get online and start writing about it," the mayor said. "It is somewhat emotional. I don't know if it's controversial. People have an opinion one way or the other. The knee-jerk reaction is, parking meters are going to hurt my business. You're talking about a quarter per half hour, how's that hurt a business?"

Written by Michael Monks, editor & publisher of The River City News

Photo: Mayor Jerry Peluso argues in favor of more parking meters in Newport/RCN