New city parking leader meets with downtown business board

In only his fourth day on the job as the city’s new parking czar, Lt. Dwayne Shellhammer of the Sarasota Police Department sat before the Downtown Improvement District…

In only his fourth day on the job as the city’s new parking czar, Lt. Dwayne Shellhammer of the Sarasota Police Department sat before the Downtown Improvement District Board of Directors. The reason for the Tuesday meeting, he said, was to introduce himself to the leaders of the self-taxing district of commercial property owners and exchange a few ideas about parking enforcement going forward. The entirety of the city’s Parking Division was officially transitioned to the SPD on Oct.

29 under the direction of City Manager Kare Friling, including all enforcement and garage maintenance and management. And don’t call the enforcement officers “meter maids,” Shellhammer stressed. Call them “parking ambassadors” who will undergo training to execute all that the moniker implies. “It's week one, but I want to have a good working relationship with you folks, and I feel like it starts here,” Shellhammer said, adding he has data culled from a recent survey of downtown business patrons.

His team will merge that with information gleaned from the department’s own survey. “We're going to use it as a metric to measure how we do in a year or so,” Shellhammer said. The transition came on the heels of a failed, albeit brief, change in parking operations approved by the City Commission that began in July. The change, which lasted only a month before it was rescinded, expanded parking enforcement hours to 8 p.m.-midnight Monday-Saturday, and from noon to midnight Sundays.

That change applied both to paid and free timed parking. “Every time something doesn't work, people always say it's about money, but it really isn't money,” said DID board member Eileen Hampshire. “People don't mind paying. They don't like the experience. Our meters don't work. We always buy meters that can't be in the sun in a place where it's sunny all the time. They aren't easy to use. They don't work half the time.

These are things we have to work on." Shellhammer pledged to do so. “I want you to know that you have a voice now, not that you didn't before, but you definitely have a direct contact line to me,” he said. “I’m a good facilitator, which is why the chief put me here.”