Scranton City Council will hold another caucus on a plan to restructure parking-system debt to avoid a default.
This caucus will take place Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall, before council’s regular weekly meeting at 6:30 p.m., according to a public notice in The Times-Tribune on Saturday.
Council President Gerald Smurl said the caucus for this Tuesday was scheduled because one held July 8 ran long. At that session, parking and city officials explained the refinancing and why it’s needed.
Afterward that night at council’s regular meeting, numerous owners of downtown businesses, residents and others expressed concerns about the restructuring plan’s expansion of street-metered hours on weekdays, and particularly on Saturdays, which currently has free street parking downtown. They expressed concerns that charging to park on streets on Saturdays would keep people away from downtown and hurt businesses and their employees, and also place extra costs and burdens on students of Lackawanna College and patrons of the Scranton Public Library.
The issue then went before council in the form of several pieces of legislation that would implement the various facets of the debt restructuring plan. While council passed most of the legislation, it deadlocked on an ordinance to amend the concession agreement from 2016 with an entity called Community Development Properties Scranton, an offshoot of the nonprofit Grow America organization that is the outside operator. Council voted 2-2 — with Mark McAndrew and Tom Schuster voting no, Smurl and Jessica Rothchild voting yes, and Bill King absent — on advancing on second reading an ordinance to amend a concession agreement regarding the city’s parking garages and street-metered spaces.
The tie vote meant that the ordinance failed, “which means we will be, in theory, putting the city in jeopardy of a default,” council Solicitor Tom Gilbride told council.
The four members who were present all wanted the administration and parking operators to ask bondholders to keep Saturday parking free. McAndrew and Schuster wanted to wait to see what negotiations would produce, before advancing the ordinance.
Charging for Saturday parking is estimated to generate about $74,000 in revenue annually. The ordinance can be resurrected and Smurl expects that it will come back before council Tuesday. He also expressed confidence that a compromise with bondholders would be reached and the refinancing would go through without any default by the outside operators that would, by extension, harm the city.
“If everything goes the way I think it will go, it (the defeated ordinance) will be reintroduced tomorrow and I think it will pass,” Smurl said Monday.
Last week, after the ordinance failed, Mayor Paige Gebhardt Cognetti and members of her administration said the city hoped to reach a compromise with bondholders.
The restructuring plan calls for the city to contribute $2 million over the next 10 years to the system for maintenance and repairs of four garages, an expansion of payment hours for street-metered spaces, installation of solar panels atop some garages to generate revenue, and the dissolving of the redundant Scranton Parking Authority.