Ridgewood loses $23,000 on valet parking test run

RIDGEWOOD — The test run for a municipal valet parking service to ease parking problems in the village's downtown wound up costing taxpayers nearly $23,000, and took in just $1,335.

At a council meeting, Village Manager Heather Mailander said she expected the three-month pilot program to do well leading up to the December holidays. The service was an exploratory program, running from October through December 2017, every Friday and Saturday night from 6 p.m. until 1 a.m.

By the end, Mailander said, the service had parked 267 vehicles in three months. She said the timing turned out to be flawed, in that the service began at 6 p.m., the same time metered parking became free.

The $5 valet fee was paid upfront by drivers, with restaurants and businesses having the option to validate it.

The village’s chief financial officer, Robert Rooney, said last week that the $22,996 loss represents 1.29 percent of the parking utility’s $1.8 million operating budget.

In a community where parking is not just a perpetual cause célèbre, but also a point of contention among residents and council members, the stumble is just the latest in a growing list.

Two mayors were slapped with separate ethics complaints concerning long-embattled plans to build a parking deck on Hudson Street, in the heart of the village's business district. More recently, the council voted to end its contract with a widely used parking payment app over misconceptions that its processing fees were costing the village unforeseen expenditures.

“We have a massive parking problem,” Councilman Jeffrey Voigt said Monday. “We are short over a thousand spots on weekends.” The village’s downtown has about 50 restaurants, he said, which provide a combined 3,000 seats in an area where streets and parking lots offer a total of 650 public spaces.

RESTAURANTS: Acclaimed 4-star chef to open an Italian restaurant in Ridgewood

EDUCATION: Schools have a message for parents of sick children - keep them home

Of the 26 parking spots on the west side of Van Neste, Mailander said the valet used four to five spaces for drop-off and reserved an additional 10 to park the vehicles. She added that at times, the vendors used only six or seven of those 10 spaces.

Resident Phil McCandless takes a contrarian view. Referring to the pilot program as a successful study, he said the village does not, in fact, have a parking problem at all.

"People found parking so easily, they didn't need a valet service," McCandless said. He warned the council against further costly efforts, such as the Hudson Street garage, which appears to be moving forward and has so far drawn proposals from four contractors.

There is some confusion as to whether the valet service was intended as a Band-Aid for the village's parking woes, or simply an attractive luxury.

Both Voigt and Mayor Susan Knudsen said they understood the service to be a relief to drivers, although Voigt referred to the service as only part of a larger plan that would include the garage and the reallocation of parking lot spaces now reserved for employees of nearby businesses.

Even though the garage and valet service are not mutually exclusive initiatives, some residents maintain that if the goal is to alleviate frustration over parking, the village would be wiser to devote its time and money to a garage.

"I was always for the garage. I voted for it twice," said resident Gay Pfeiffer. "Valet versus that? No. I would prefer to have a garage.

"It's fine for the restaurants," she said of the valet, adding that "otherwise" she did not feel it was useful.

However, Councilman Ramon Hache, who serves as council liaison to the Chamber of Commerce and was a key proponent of the valet program, said valet was never meant to be a solution to the parking shortage.

“It was meant to bring people downtown,” Hache said at last week’s meeting, echoing his comments from October that the program could inspire impulse shopping as diners walked from the valet site to a restaurant. He also promoted the service as a way to ease traffic by keeping drivers from circling block after block in search of an empty spot.

Many on the council and downtown merchants agreed that businesses had failed to promote the service, and were not regularly validating their customers' parking tickets.

“The restaurants should have paid the $5; that probably would have helped,” said Voigt. “If we do this, that’s what we need to have happen. I don’t think the taxpayers are going to pay another $23,000 for an experiment.”

“I don’t think anyone asked me personally” to validate a parking ticket, acknowledged Ryan Brining, owner of the restaurant White Maple, although he said one of his servers could have been asked.

“At the end of the day, pretty much nobody knew about it,” chef and restaurateur Michael Velicu of Mediterranean restaurant told the council, echoing earlier comments from Hache, who had said the signage was limited and easily missed.

Knudsen said she had spoken with one restaurateur who argued that owners of less-tony eateries felt validations would mean "taking a $5 hit" on dinner checks running at a $25 average.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story appeared on northjersey.com.

Email: katzban@northjersey.com