Winter Park city officials on Tuesday backed off a proposed plan to create paid parking at Lake Baldwin Park, citing a decades-old agreement that requires residents of Orlando and Winter Park to have equal access to the park.
The agreement, signed 24 years ago by city leaders in 2002, states that all parks around Lake Baldwin that are “owned, operated and controlled by Orlando and Winter Park shall remain open and unrestricted to all residents of Orlando and Winter Park, on the same terms such parks are available to each jurisdiction’ s own residents.”
That, evidently, includes Lake Baldwin Park. City leaders, in a statement, acknowledged that allowing residents of both Orlando and Winter Park to park for free at Lake Baldwin Park, while forcing others to pay, would create an administrative burden that they would rather not touch.
“If the pilot program went forward at Lake Baldwin Park, Orlando residents would need to be exempted from the parking fee the same as Winter Park residents, which administratively would be a larger undertaking,” said Winter Park city manager Randy Knight in a statement. “As a result of this document and input received from citizens, the city is removing Lake Baldwin Park from the Pay for Parking Pilot Program but will continue to move forward with the pilot at Dinky Dock.”
“The technology behind this program is still important to explore as a tool to manage parking more effectively,” he added.
Orlando Weekly reported last Friday that the city was considering paid parking at Lake Baldwin Park, in addition to Dinky Dock over by Rollins College. Lake Baldwin Park contains a popular dog park and is visited by “a great deal of” non-Winter Park residents, according to city staff.
Even so, the city pitched the idea of allowing Winter Park residents, effective next spring, to specifically be excluded from a six-month paid parking pilot at Lake Baldwin Park and Dinky Dock. Residents of Winter Park, under the proposal, would have been able to register two vehicles per household for a free parking permit.
Under the proposed paid parking plan, parking at both spots would have cost visitors within the ballpark (no pun intended) of $2 to $3 an hour, or a flat daily rate of $20. The proposal, advanced unanimously by the Winter Park City Commission last week, still required a formal ordinance to be drafted for a vote. That ordinance would have — and still will, in Dinky Dock’s case — be subject to a public hearing.
City documents show the goal of the parking pilot program is to “enhance” the parking experience in Winter Park and “to modernize management, improve operational efficiency, and offset expenditure cost to support municipal services.”
City staff chose the two locations because of the lower risk identified for traffic bleeding into nearby neighborhoods, although city staff admitted that risk, even so, wasn’t exactly zero.
City leaders did not dismiss the idea of expanding paid parking lots to other parks of Winter Park, but city staff said that they would want more data on the outcomes of a paid parking pilot before expanding anywhere further.
The pitch comes at a time when cities and counties statewide are grappling with how to potentially weather the major loss in revenue they face if voters in November pass Florida’s Amendment 3.
Amendment 3 is a GOP-backed ballot measure that would effectively suck billions of dollars in property tax revenue from local governments — think funding for transportation, libraries, police and fire fighters, and public parks — annually through an expanded property tax exemption. Policy experts predict the measure would actually shift costs from homeowners onto renters, while forcing local governments, like Winter Park, to make difficult decisions on spending.
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