After nearly a year of waiting for state approval, a divided City Council voted Wednesday to dissolve the Jersey City Parking Authority and place its operations under the Police Department. Councilmen Richard Boggiano and Michael Yun voted against the change.
This will result in a reduction of staff from 77 to 64, said Public Safety Director James Shea.
“All of these are administrative,” he said. “The rest of the staff will be brought over whole if they choose to take the positions.”
The administrative staff will be streamlined so that there will be one director, one assistant director, and one supervisor. The rest of the staff will be workers.
Current employees will be brought on at their existing salaries, although future employees will be hired for less.
While the original proposal would have shifted meter repair and some other operations to the Department of Public Works, Shea said this change would be delayed for one year. He said with the DPW and the Jersey City Improvement Authority being merged, he wanted to let things shake out before he imposed additional duties on the newly-merged departments.
“This will lighten the police load and allow them to concentrate in other areas.” – James Shea
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“This is usually something like blocked driveways,” Shea said. “And since such complaints came over as low priority, they were often not responded to promptly. The new operation will be 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Parking workers will respond to the complaints, not police.”
Councilman Richard Boggiano disagreed with this provision saying that when people call, they want police to respond.
Shea, however, said parking workers and police will be working closely together, and indeed, police will be able to provide needed information on vehicles that is not currently available to parking workers, such as background information that would justify having a vehicle towed or booted.
Better service, savings to the city
Shea said the change would allow police to concentrate on policy duties.
“This will lighten the police load and allow them to concentrate in other areas,” Shea said.
The estimated savings to the city is about $750,000 at the start, and more as new workers come on to replace retiring workers. The original estimate was $2.5 million.
There will be a small team of parking workers after midnight, which will allow the city to crack down on trucks currently illegally parking on the streets.
This change is part of a consolidating of city services, part of an agenda Mayor Steve Fulop has been promoting since taking office in July 2013.
The move was delayed by the wait for state approval. The Local Finance Board unanimously approved this measure after studying the impact on the workers involved in the change.
Under the change, parking enforcement will fall under a traffic and parking division within the Jersey City Public Safety Department. Further, parking enforcement personnel will have additional ticketing abilities to enforce quality of life issues.
City ambulance contract awarded to JCMC
The city council voted to award a three-year contract to Jersey City Medical Center–St. Barnabas Health covering emergency medical services.
“We look forward to continuing to serve Jersey City as we have for more than a century,” said Medical Center CEO Joseph F. Scott, who attended Wednesday’s meeting. “We are proud to provide basic life support to Jersey City’s residents and visitors in every community.”
This comes a year after Fulop had proposed the contract be awarded to McCabe Ambulance service of Bayonne, which partnered with CarePoint Healthcare.
Questions about the bidding process caused the city to seek new bids, and Fulop’s recommendation last week was to give the contract to JCMC instead.
“We appreciate the strong vote of confidence from Mayor Fulop and the committee in recommending the Jersey City Medical Center as their choice to continue providing BLS (basic life support) to the city,” Scott said in a statement.
JCMC has had the contract with the city for more than 100 years. But in the last five year contract, the city paid as much as $4 million to JCMC for the service. The city will not be charged under the new contract.
Al Sullivan may be reached at asullivan@hudsonreporter.com.