Paid parking rollout sparks confusion

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Sandpoint’s long-awaited and debated paid parking program rolled out July 1, though amid continued and widespread consternation by the public, rising even to outright protest.

Residents and visitors alike expressed their displeasure with the new system on its opening day — particularly regarding the parking kiosks located at 43 locations throughout the downtown two-hour zones on First and Second avenues, Cedar Street and portions of Third Avenue and Main and Church streets.

Sandpoint Planning and Community Development Director Jason Welker told the Reader that a software glitch affected the machines, which defaulted to full-day parking rather than the two-hour free parking provided for in the zone, and further confused would-be users.

“The kiosks are not working as designed,” he said. “They should default to the minimum of free parking … It’s not what was supposed to happen.”

Welker added that the glitch was being addressed on July 1, with fixes being handled manually by technicians, and all the kiosks would be fully updated by that afternoon.

“I’m not terribly surprised there was a technical glitch, but it’s frustrating,” he said.

City officials, including Welker, emphasized that the city will only issue warnings for paid parking violations during its first two weeks to give users time to better understand the system.

The Reader spoke with more than a dozen downtown visitors throughout the day on July 1, and all said they either didn’t understand the kiosk system, opted simply not to use it or both.

Later in the day, residents also expressed their frustration at a community protest in the city-owned parking lot at Third Avenue and Church Street, where about 20 people gathered at 4 p.m. holding signs. 

Organizer Sara Harris, a Sandpoint resident and downtown worker, told the Reader that she wasn’t opposed to paid parking, just that it shouldn’t fall on locals — be they city or county residents.

“The way they’re doing it doesn’t make sense,” she said, going on to refer to the two-hour zone kiosks, which enable free parking for up to two hours, then the option to add time for $4 per hour. 

“It’s creating an incentive to stay longer,” she added. “The most you can pay there is $4, so the most you could pay for a full day is $24, so you could stay there all day for about half what the $50 ticket would have cost.”

Other attendees criticized what they perceived as City Hall’s lack of communication about the plan — as well as the inability for county residents to have a say — though the plan had been extensively reported by area media and worked on in public meetings and workshops over the past 18 months.

Ryan Lohman, another Sandpoint resident and local worker, argued that the parking plan should be rolled back because the city passed it without the proper ordinance in place.

To the Reader’s knowledge, that claim has yet to be evaluated by legal experts, but Lohman is going further, passing out a petition at the July 1 protest and launching a GoFundMe campaign aimed at recalling Sandpoint Mayor Jeremy Grimm and councilors who voted for the plan in the summer of 2025.

“This is the first time I’ve ever gotten involved in politics — I’ve never protested in my life,” Lohman said. “I just don’t want to see this place destroyed. … People have to have a way to undo what’s happened.”

Many of the same comments and sentiments had been roiling local social media forums over the preceding days, with dozens of posts garnering hundreds of responses decrying the paid parking system as unnecessarily complicated, intrusive to users’ privacy, detrimental to downtown merchants and potentially adopted improperly by the Sandpoint City Council.

Tensions had grown so high in the week before the rollout that Sandpoint Mayor Jeremy Grimm signed a two-page statement posted to the city’s Facebook page calling for calm.

“Reasonable people can disagree about public policy. …,” he wrote in the statement dated June 25. “Unfortunately, the public conversation has recently taken a troubling turn. Some online discussions have included increasingly hostile rhetoric and references to violence against government officials and destruction of public property. Let me be clear: There is no place for threats, intimidation or glorification of violence in Sandpoint.”

Grimm went on to highlight “misinformation being shared online,” including “opinions and speculations presented as fact” alongside “statements that are simply inaccurate.”

While the mayor’s statement addressed several common points of contention regarding the purpose and functioning of the paid parking system, he and Welker went directly to the public with a presentation and Q&A session at the Downtown Sandpoint Business Association’s regular June 30 meeting, which drew nearly 80 attendees to Marigold Bistro at 8 a.m.

“The reason I’m here this morning is just to let you know that this is not a kneejerk reaction. This is something that the city’s been working on for well over a year and a half,” Grimm said. “We’ve had numerous meetings with downtown businesses … and we’ve done surveys and studies.

“This is not some fly-by-night, let’s-try-to-extract-money-from-our-residents-and-visitors [policy].”

The paid parking system is concentrated on a number of city-owned parking lots and the two-hour zone centered in the downtown core. Users can access sandpoint.thepermitportal.com to purchase annual resident and non-resident permits for $20 and $35, respectively, enabling up to eight hours of parking per day in the city lots at Third Avenue and Church Street, Bridge Street, City Beach, Dock Street Marina and the Pend Oreille Bay Trail. Without a valid permit, users of those facilities are required to pay an hourly fee beginning July 1.

Street parking in the two-hour downtown zone remains free up to the posted time limit, though parking longer than that will require payment of $4 per additional hour. Vehicles parking in that zone will be required to enter their license plate number at any of the kiosks, regardless of their permit, or through the ParkSmarter mobile app.

Likewise, parking will remain free up to the three- and four-hour limits in those respective zones. However, users who wish to secure 24-hour parking in downtown lots as well as the three- and four-hour street parking zones — plus up to eight hours in the waterfront lots — can pay $40 per month. 

Those with handicap placards or license plates are allowed unlimited parking in any zone or parking lot throughout the city, with no permits or kiosk check-ins required.

There are also a number of seasonal boat launch permit options, or a $10 daily launch fee, which does not include parking, for those without permits.

Complete information about the various zones, permit types and other FAQs is available at sandpointidaho.gov/parking.

At the June 30 meeting of the DSBA, Welker emphasized that the program is intended to encourage vehicle turnover in the two-hour zone, thereby benefiting downtown businesses by giving customers more opportunities to find vacant parking stalls, and generate revenue from out-of-area users at City Beach.

“The message we got from downtown business owners who packed City Council chambers last May was that they wanted to see better enforcement over time limits downtown,” Welker said. “Technology is one way to do that. What this technology will allow is basically a doubling of the efficiency of time limits, enforcing every vehicle in that two-hour zone, which is only about one-fourth of our downtown street parking.”

Punctuated by numerous interruptions and questions asked out of turn by audience members, the meeting remained tense throughout as Welker and Grimm addressed topics and concerns ranging from the technology used in the kiosks to enforcement times, to how employees should navigate the system.

“[T]he goal here is to have downtown employees use the downtown city parking lot or to use [the downtown periphery],” Welker said. “The reason for that is when employees consume those desirable parking spaces right in front of your business, that’s less money that’s going to be spent in your business.”

In response to a question about the ability to use cash to pay for parking, Welker said the kiosks are a cashless system, and “if someone’s uncomfortable tapping a screen with their debit card or credit card or their phone or their watch, then they can park in the three-hour spots.”

Sandpoint purchased the kiosks up-front for more than $220,000, which Welker said means any data collected by the machines will be handled and retained by the city.

According to Welker, the city will only write tickets for time limit violations between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. The no-overnight parking rule is intended to stop people from leaving their cars on downtown streets for extended overnight periods.

Sandpoint Police Lt. Michael Aerni, who oversees the community resource officers and therefore parking enforcement, said there is “0% chance to get a parking ticket in the middle of the night.”

Welker also raised the possibility of “turning off” the two-hour zone kiosks during the shoulder seasons — saying he thought councilors “would be open to just disabling the street kiosks” during those months. That idea appealed to Harris, who said “they definitely should do that.”

The one-hour June 30 meeting included discussion of multiple other aspects of the plan, but ultimately Grimm said the city is “not out here to be the Gestapo of parking, so we will be implementing this gradually. There’ll be a huge grace period as people understand how to enter their license plates into the kiosk. In about two weeks we’re going to be issuing warnings, so we’re not gonna try to go out there and browbeat people.”