Wednesday, April 3, 2024–11:42 a.m.
-David Crowder, WRGA News-
As the City of Rome continues to look at privatizing parking management downtown, county officials would like to continue to maintain their own parking lots and parking decks.
Floyd County Manager Jamie McCord told the Rome-Floyd Joint Services Committee on Tuesday that the county has been managing its surface parking lots at the courthouse and the law enforcement center.
“We don’t have a problem doing that,” he said. “We’ve got the tag reader like you guys have and it’s being handled by PD.”
The county also maintains the Sixth Avenue parking deck at the joint law enforcement center and the Fourth Avenue deck.
“We’ve got more than adequate parking,” McCord said. “Store frontage parking is debatable, but it’s hard to find the decks full except for the 4th of July and the Christmas Parade.”
McCord also told the committee that the county is getting ready to do $250,000 in work on the Sixth Avenue deck.
“Currently, you’ve got two full police forces parking there, and they are getting ready to vacate,” he said. “We clearly have to sustain it for lower courts. We have a secure parking problem that we have to address as well since we are going to be splitting superior court and lower courts. Superior court is finally going to have adequate parking on their side. We can move some of the judges over to secure parking on the other side. Obviously, we have employee parking, public parking, and other things, but there are more than enough spaces.”
Rome Downtown Development Authority Director Aundi Lesley seemed to be in favor of the county maintaining its own parking.
“It’s really ironic timing because another property owner who has four private lots downtown has approached us about managing those,” Lesley said. “So, it kind of works out for us if the county rolls off and you are managing your own. We can take on these additional four lots and it would not be an additional burden on us at that point.”
“We’ve had parking the way it is for a number of years, under the premise that we have X number of decks and an X amount of private lots,” said Rome City Manager Sammy Rich. “So, we’re really all in a state of flux. Honestly, we’re probably going to have to start over. That’s my assumption.”
Recently, the city received parking management proposals from three private companies, with the knowledge that the parking situation is a fluid one. Lesley said those proposals included all the surface parking spaces and all the decks, so the scope of work will have to be redone as will the bidding process. The RFP [request for proposals] process is expected to take about six months.
