Is Freehold surrendering on paid parking? Well, for a a little while, and on some days

Sweet Lew’s Cafe in Freehold is among the businesses that say they have been hurt by the borough’s paid parking program.

FREEHOLD – Visitors to the borough during the next five weeks won’t have to pay to park during the day in three municipal lots, officials said Monday, ceding to downtown merchants who said the new paid parking program was cutting into business.

At least one business owner, Keith Lewis at Sweet Lew’s Cafe on Main Street, said customer traffic has increased noticeably since the so-called paid parking holiday went into effect last week.

“When we started (the holiday) last week on Tuesday, we already started seeing an uptick,” Lewis said Monday afternoon. “Yesterday was good, today was bangin’.”

The details:

• Motorists can park for free all day Sunday, Monday and Tuesday and until 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday in the McGackin Triangle, Borough Hall and Market Yard parking lots.
• They will need to pay $2 an hour from 4 p.m. until 11 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday in those three lots.
• Paid street parking remains in effect every day from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.

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It marks a shift for the borough, which has attracted new restaurants and visitors in recent years, creating growing pains that were familiar to trendy towns like Red Bank and Asbury Park.

Hoping to free up parking spaces and generate revenue for maintenance, officials last September began charging motorists $1 an hour from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and $2 an hour from 5 p.m. to 3 a.m. each day to park in the three lots. It meant 40% of the town’s 1,400 spaces were paid.

A newly installed parking meter on South Street in Freehold Borough. The town has installed parking meters in the downtown to free up space in an increasingly crowded area.

Thinking twice about Freehold

Store owners, however, said business this winter slowed down, and they think paid parking was a chief reason.

In addition to the extra expense, they said, visitors complained that the technology, operated by Flowbird, was cumbersome. While they no longer needed to scrounge up dimes and quarters to put into a meter, they now needed to either download an app onto their phone or walk to a kiosk, enter their license plate number and insert coins or cards.

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Paul Sagnay, 33, of Jackson, hopped out of his white SUV on Monday, took a picture of his license plate and started to walk toward the kiosk until he was informed he wouldn’t have to pay.

Sagnay used to live in Freehold and said the paid parking program makes him think twice about visiting.

“Sometimes I think about it, honestly,” he said. “It’s a bunch of places. It kind of makes me double-think about coming. It actually does. Should I find somewhere closer to my location?”

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Not afraid to make changes

Mayor Kevin Kane said the borough was trying to find a balance. Freehold ushered in paid parking in part because downtown restaurant owners had worried that parking was becoming so scarce, particularly on weekend nights, that customers were canceling reservations.

Five months later, officials met with restaurant owners who said the policy had gone too far and was keeping daytime visitors away. Officials decided to scale back the paid parking hours until April 1 and see if it would jump-start business.

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Freehold Borough Mayor Kevin Kane at special council meeting on July 27, 2021

“The initial thought was that (the change) is working,” Kane said. “We’re going to continue to assess. We said we weren’t going to be afraid to make changes as we implement it.”

Lewis, who has owned Sweet Lew’s for 33 years, said business was down 30% from the same time last year, forcing him to cut back on employees’ hours.

He considered other factors that might have been behind the tailspin. But paid parking emerged as his top guess.

“We were having a fine year until September ’23, and then it literally dropped off the edge of the table,” he said.

Michael L. Diamond is a business reporter who has been writing about the New Jersey economy and health care industry for more than 20 years. He can be reached at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Is Freehold surrendering on paid parking? Well, for a a little while, and on some days