Carbondale has rolled the dice and landed on free parking.
At Tuesday's meeting of the city council, leaders voted to suspend enforcement of downtown parking meters from July 1 through the end of the year -- a trial program that grew out of concerns about employees of downtown businesses being forced to pay for parking each day that they work.
Now, however, all public parking downtown will be free for a period of seven months, with a few caveats. Free parking will be limited to just three hours per vehicle at a time, and signage will be installed at lot 8 -- located along South Illinois Avenue across the street from the Evolve building -- noting that long-term and overnight parking are prohibited there.
The city also will grant up to 10 parking passes to each downtown businesses that will allow their employees to exceed the three-hour parking limit.
The measure passed with the support of Jeff Doherty, Adam Loos, Jessica Bradshaw and Carolin Harvey. Harvey acted as mayor pro tem due to the absence of Mayor Mike Henry.
Lee Fronabarger and Tom Grant both voted against the change. In comments following the vote, both said they did so because they felt the measure had strayed too far from its original intended purpose of providing relief to employees of downtown businesses.
