St. Augustine Beach commissioners support $2.50 hourly rate for paid parking and resident discount. (SAR)

No business plan.  Eleven (11) public hearing witnesses opposed this hare-brained scheme.  No St. Augustine Record reporter attended the meeting.  More pitiful PR for pitiful St. Augustine Beach City Manager for Life BRUE MAX ROYLE.

Privately-owned, secretive PASSPORT salesman KELSEY OWENS speed-answers a few questions from incurious St. Augustine Beach Commissioners, whose half-baked plan has folks up in arms.



St. Augustine Beach commissioners support $2.50 hourly rate for paid parking and resident discount


By Sheldon Gardner
Posted Dec 18, 2018 at 8:08 PM
Updated at 6:36 AM
St. Augustine Record

Residents and visitors can expect to start paying for parking soon in St. Augustine Beach.

At a special meeting this week, commissioners supported charging $2.50 per hour for 300 spaces in the city. If everything is implemented as discussed, St. Augustine Beach residents will pay a discounted rate of 50 cents an hour, and St. Augustine residents will pay $1.25 an hour.

Enforcement hours are expected to be 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. The city is working with the company Passport Labs to create the city’s paid parking system.

The system will accept payments via a smartphone app, said Kelsey Owens, a sales director for Passport. People can also add more time to their spaces via the app.

“They can extend their parking, so if I only paid for one hour, but you know what, I want to hang out at the beach a little bit longer, I can extend directly from my beach chair. I don’t even have to go back to my vehicle,” she said at the meeting.

People who have cellphones that aren’t smartphones will be able to pay over the phone by calling a number posted on signs at the paid parking spaces, she said.

Passport charges 35 cents on top of the hourly charge, which goes to the company. But that’s a one-time charge per parking session, Owens said. For instance, people who have already paid for parking wouldn’t have to pay 35 cents again if they add more time for their parking space.

Commissioners are expected to vote on the contract with Passport and resolutions solidifying the parking rates and other details in early 2019. City officials want the system to be fully up and running by April, City Manager Max Royle said.

The city has a list of all of the areas scheduled to be included in the paid parking system. They include more than 100 spaces on 2nd Avenue and close to 40 spaces on 16th Street, east and west of A1A Beach Boulevard, according to backup materials. City officials don’t plan to implement paid parking in several areas where public parking is shared with adjacent businesses.


To keep traffic from spilling into neighborhoods, the city plans to put up more signs restricting parking on residential roads, Royle said.

The city plans to hire a parking enforcement officer as well, he said. The officer will not only help enforce the paid parking system, but will also help deal with people who are trying to illegally park in residential areas.

In addition to the city’s efforts, Royle said he expects the county to begin charging for parking at the pier, which is county property.

“Once the county says we’re going to put paid parking at the pier, all our visitors are going to start looking for the free spaces,” Royle said at the meeting. “And that’s our side streets, and our plazas and so forth.”

Jesse Dunn, director of the county’s budget office, said the county plans to solicit proposals in January for paid parking at the pier to see whether it makes sense for the county to move forward with the effort.