After blowback online and from business owners, the Bainbridge Island City Council has cooled on the idea of adding paid public parking in the downtown Winslow corridor — but depending on how it plays out in other cities, they may warm up again.

Council heard a presentation from BI police chief Joe Clark at the July 8 city council meeting about dedicating $13,200 for a consultant to review updates to the 2018 Bainbridge Island Downtown Parking Strategies Report — namely, whether adding paid parking downtown would be financially feasible.

During public comment, Kim McCormick Osmond, a former member of the Planning Commission and representative for the two largest business owners in Winslow — Town and Country and Haggar Scribner Properties — expressed the business’s concern with adding paid parking.

“HSP and T&C would like to suggest that the first order of business should be to determine whether paid parking will provide any useful economic benefits to downtown merchants and persons shopping there, and to assess whether those benefits — if any — outweigh negative impacts. [We] strongly believe that paid parking will deter BI residents from coming to downtown to shop, eat and enjoy everything downtown has to offer, to the detriment of business and all islanders,” McCormick Osmond said. “Second, the 2018 report noted that 92 percent of available parking is located off-street in public or private off-street lots. The largest lots are owned by TNC and HSP. Parking by non-patrons is already a serious issue for [us], and implementing paid public parking will make it worse.”

The council took no action on the item.

City leaders first expressed interest in adding paid parking to the area in January and contacted Rick Williams Consulting to create a revenue forecast of the plan based on the cost of implementation and how much funding it would draw in. The proposed scope of work would include the cost to install, maintain, and operate a pay-to-park equipment and a technology system, while generating “reasonable net revenue” for the city, council agenda documents stated.

This would be a newly-explored idea, explained Clark; back in 2018, the report suggested seven ways the city could improve its parking downtown, though paid parking did not make the list.

“[It] was not recommended due to limited availability of parking downtown. No further evaluation of the paid system was done at that time,” he said.

The city did take up other suggestions from the report: it implemented consistent time-limits on downtown parking, increased on-street availability through changes to boat-trailer parking allowances, and the recently added bike corral added additional emphasis on non-motorized transportation, Clark noted.

If the city were to approve a second look at paid parking by consultants, it may be able to create a new source of revenue, he said.

At least four members of council were not impressed. Councilmembers Joe Deets, Clarence Moriwaki, Kirsten Hytopolous and BI Mayor Ashley Mathews all expressed disapproval for paid parking in Winslow.

Deets, Moriwaki and Hytopolous were in agreement that the idea of adding paid parking downtown did not seem to provide a benefit to businesses downtown. For minimum-wage employees of downtown businesses, adding paid parking could be a cost burden, Moriwaki pointed out; and while $13,000 is peanuts to an organization with a $40 million budget, “the money could be spent in other ways,” he said.

It also just isn’t the right time, Hytopolous and Deets both stated, but that could change down the road. They both pointed out that other towns that rely on tourism, like Port Townsend and Poulsbo, have each implemented paid parking in their downtown areas, which could serve as a bellwether for a similar program on BI.

“Cute small towns that are precious to people are doing this, and it is an important revenue source, but I think given the issues of it being a functional place for us as well, I just don’t think, politically, this is the right time to do this,” Hytopolous said.