Neighborhood's Long Parking Permit Nightmare Is Over (They Hope)

It has taken nearly two years, but the residents of a small corner of the city's Forest Park Southeast neighborhood are again able to get permits for parking — and if that doesn't sound like cause for celebration, perhaps you have not lived in St. Louis long enough.

The saga began in the spring of 2022, when the nonprofit Park Central Development relinquished administration of the parking permit program to the treasurer's office for the City of St. Louis. The timeline of when Park Central notified the city it wanted help with the program is a matter of some dispute, but what's clear is that when permits for the 10 districts in Forest Park Southeast and the Central West End came up for renewal that June, no one was fully prepared to process them. The treasurer's office was acquiring new software to prepare for the task, but it wasn't yet up and running — and the employee at Park Central whose primary purview the permits fell under had left.

The upshot is that residents who wanted to renew could not, nor could newer neighbors get permits in the first place. And with the neighborhoods' streets being overrun with Wash U medical students looking for a cheap place to leave their cars all day, not ticketing wasn't a solution.

So the city ticketed. And then the treasurer's office voided all tickets given to the actual residents, because everybody agreed that the inability to issue new permits wasn't their fault. When I wrote about the situation last February , the residents were pretty fed up, but the city promised that help was on the way. Treasurer Adam Layne declined to say just when, but said, "We’re in the final stages of testing, and we hope to have applications open in the coming months." Of the period without a working system, he added, “We’d hoped it wouldn’t go through February, but we knew it could.”

Layne tells the RFT the new permitting system was finally up and running by last September/October, six months after my story. There was just one problem: The online system didn't allow residents in one of the 10 parking districts previously administered by Park Central to get the free permits they were owed.

Yes, by city ordinance, residents of one smaller area — the Chouteau/Newstead parking district — were entitled to free permits, while employees of businesses who wanted to park on its streets were required to pay twice as much to compensate. And the way the new software was set up didn't allow for $0 payment.

So the beat went on, along with the dance of the city ticketing and then the city refunding the tickets. One resident, exasperated, broke down and paid for the permit even though she didn't have to.

Her neighbor, Zen Harbison, says the others held the line: "We refused. I'm not going to pay it." He instead continued to send his parking tickets to the treasurer's office to be canceled. Earlier this week, when Harbison's tally had reached four needing to be voided, he emailed the city CCing multiple neighbors who'd also been ticketed, as well as the RFT.

"If the ticket people come out a third time we will have to escalate this issue, because everyone knows our particular district still is not functioning yet you all persist with blanket coverage," he wrote. "Not hard to skip our streets until it works."

Yesterday, residents finally received the news that the system was fully operational — and even the Chouteau/Newstead district can now obtain new residential permits. Layne confirmed the fix to the RFT . Harbison says it's looking operational.

And so, one year, 10 months and countless emails and voided tickets later, it's a St. Louis happy ending. But not everyone is fully satisfied just yet.

Now the neighbor who went ahead and coughed up the $20 for an annual residential permit has emailed the city to ask for a refund.

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