Parking fees now active on Newport Bayfront

As of today (Wednesday, May 1), the city of Newport’s new pay-to-park program on the Bayfront is up and running.

Newport Public Works employees were busy last week installing 10 new pay stations, along with new signage — regulatory signs, text-to-park signs, parking lot identification signs — to help inform motorists of the new system. There are around 240 signs in total, officials said.

The fee for parking will be in effect between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m., seven days a week, from May through October. From November through April, people will only be required to pay for parking from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.

The paid parking program is in effect at every public parking space on the Bayfront, although there are some differences in certain regions. Newport Director of Community Development Derrick Tokos said for metered parking, “It’s going to be $1 an hour. There’s some areas where it’s meter only. There’s other areas where it’s meter unless you have a permit, and then there are some areas that are just a time limitation unless you have a permit.” In the cases where somebody is paying a meter, there is a four-hour limit, he added.

There are pay stations at several locations around the Bayfront, as opposed to individual meters at each parking space. People also have the text-to-park option, allowing them to pay directly from a cellphone, rather than walking over to a pay station. This is made possible because the entire program functions through a license plate identification system.

“All of this is license plate driven,” Tokos said. “In text-to-park, you go in there and do your payment, you plug in your license plate information, and that goes into the cloud data base.” This license plate system applies both to metered and permit parking.

A parking enforcement officer will scan license plates while driving along the Bayfront, and there will be an alert on the scanner if a particular license plate indicates that no parking fee was paid for that vehicle.

The total city budget for this paid parking project was $640,000, with about half of that going toward resurfacing two Bayfront parking lots and paving a third. The city is projecting revenue of between $350,000 and $500,000 per year, which will be reinvested in the Bayfront Parking District and also used to pay for parking enforcement.

There are some Bayfront businesses that have parking available on their private property. These parking spaces are managed by those individual businesses and are not part of the city’s pay-to-park program.