The Altoona Parking Authority and its newly hired management team will meet soon with downtown “stakeholders” to discuss those stakeholder concerns and potential changes in regulations that will govern how parking is handled in the central business district.

One of the main reasons for hiring SP Plus to manage parking in the rapidly redeveloping downtown is to discourage employees, college students and others from parking for extended hours in premium street and lot spaces that businesses and medical practices would like to reserve for their customers and patients.

SP Plus issues tickets, but for now, they’re only $5, which allows scofflaws to “abuse” the system by simply paying for their violations, rather than parking where the authority wants them to park, according to Senior Facilities Manager Jess Bilko of SP Plus.

A potential strategy for helping keep the streets and designated lot spaces open for customers is to charge for those spaces — charges that could be forgiven by the businesses and medical practices they visit through “validation” — so that the businesses or medical practices, not the customers, would pay.

But a representative of Mountain View Eye Associates expressed concern about that plan.

Having to deal with smart phone apps and street kiosks to make initial payments could discourage his patients from coming to his practice, especially older patients, according to the Mountain View representative.

Having to seek validation for the space they occupy would further complicate the matter, according to the Mountain View representative.

Validation would also be an inconvenience and a burden on staff, he said.

The representative proposed, instead, that businesses be allowed to pay the authority for the spaces used by their customers and patients, based on monthly visitation volumes.

“I’d rather pay as a business and keep the patients free,” the representative said. “The biggest thing anyone says is it really sucks to park (downtown).”

But the representatives’ proposal could create difficulties, if some of the businesses didn’t play fair in their customer-volume estimates, according to Bilko.

Two representatives from a downtown hair salon seconded the Mountain View representative’s concern about keeping the free spaces open for customers.

The problem of people parking hour after hour in those spaces is “bad,” one salon representative said.

Her own customers who can’t find a spot often cancel appointments, the salon representative said.

Moreover, the validation “seems like a lot of work, when we’re running our own business,” the salon representative said.

The validation process is actually quite simple, once people get used to it, Bilko said.

There’s currently a lot of misinformation floating around concerning downtown parking, according to Bilko.

“A lot of knee-jerk reaction,” said authority Chairwoman Sherri McGregor.

That has resulted from the widespread anticipation of change, after years of the downtown not having many significant parking issues, according to McGregor.

The recent redevelopment that has increased the demand for spaces is “a good thing” — but it has also created “a perfect storm,” McGregor said.

An outside company like SP Plus is ideal for dealing with that storm because it can look at the situation “holistically, with fresh eyes, not personally attached to anyone,” McGregor said.

SP Plus is trying to collect parking data so that it can develop a management plan, with the help of stakeholder input, while also attempting to educate downtown visitors, according to Bilko.

The system will be designed to raise the revenue needed to pay for itself, but without charging “outrageous fees,” according to McGregor.

“It will take a while” to work it all out, Bilko said.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.