The Altoona Parking Authority voted unanimously Tuesday to terminate its contract with the firm it hired a little more than a year ago to manage parking in the downtown.

“There was a pattern of ongoing issues” with Metropolis, formerly SP Plus — especially connected with the recent start of street enforcement, according to board member and city manager Christopher McGuire, who spoke of confusion about signs; a janitor ticketed three times when parked near where he was working at the Transportation Center; and tensions created when Farmers Market vendors were directed to park in the Transportation Center garage, a block from their stalls in Heritage Plaza.

The city will replace Metropolis through the hiring of an individual downtown parking manager — a position the city’s Human Resources Department had already begun working to fill by Tuesday afternoon, according to McGuire.

The authority’s invoking of a 30-day termination clause in the contract seemed to come as a shock to Metropolis senior manager Jess Bilko and office manager Nadine Miller, but neither offered to comment afterward.

The issues with enforcement threatened “to damage the brand” that the city has been laboring to create, McGuire said.

“The relationship with Metropolis was not serving us in the way we thought,” McGuire said. “I have talked with multiple City Council members and they are of the opinion it’s time we move in a different direction.”

One of the members of council is Mayor Matt Pacifico, who is also a member of the authority board.

For years, the late Patrick Miller, who was second in command at Altoona Blair County Development Corp., served as executive director of the Parking Authority as a favor to city officials, “God bless him,” Pacifico said.

But the city’s parking system downtown was then and still remains “antiquated,” with not enough spaces to accommodate the revitalization that is occurring, Pacifico said.

He’s “not a big fan” of Metropolis’s strategy to deal with the modernization it was hired to bring about, the mayor said.

That includes the company’s not providing enough help with setting up parking zones, he said.

Metropolis didn’t do enough to ensure there wasn’t confusion due to a lack of signage designating free parking zones and the number of hours allowed, when street enforcement commenced, McGuire said.

The company was also not sufficiently responsive to recent requests for a new system of meters for a limited segment of the downtown, according to McGuire.

“They kept coming back with stuff that was super expensive,” McGuire said.

McGuire himself identified a company Tuesday that could provide meters at considerably less cost than the equipment that Metropolis identified, McGuire said.

The issue with the janitor and the Farmers Market vendors was critical because it meant they would have needed to lug trash in one case and produce and equipment in the other farther than was convenient, McGuire said.

While the Metropolis officials didn’t push back on the termination, Miller informed the board that the street enforcement has freed up many spaces, because downtown employees who got tickets for parking in spaces that are limited to two hours free began parking instead either in spaces leased by their employers in surface lots or in the city garage.

Such street-space turnover was one of the key reasons for starting enforcement.

Authority solicitor Amanda Seelye will be looking into the process of separating from Metropolis, McGuire said.

No money needs to be exchanged either way to complete the severance, he said.

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