By
Kevin Coughlin
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A municipal parking garage won’t go up this year in Morristown. But parking rates will.
The hikes, postponed from spring 2020 by the pandemic, actually took effect on New Year’s Day. (Chart below.) They are the first major increases since 2008, according to Nicole Fox, executive director of the Morristown Parking Authority.
“We’re overdue. Salaries go up every year. Expenses, everything costs more,” said Fox, hired last summer after the death of Michael Fabrizio.
In a year-end virtual interview last week, Fox mapped out 2022 plans for her semi-autonomous agency.
With a $4 million budget and around 30 full- and part-time employees, the MPA operates garages on Cattano Avenue, DeHart Street and Ann/Bank streets; several surface lots, and 700 metered spaces. It also enforces neighborhood permit parking for the town.
The former director of the Passaic County Improvement Authority has a lot on her plate.
She still is assessing the pandemic’s substantial impact on the MPA’s bottom line, while trying to hire more parking attendants. The parking authority also is mulling whether to mandate body cams for enforcement officers, after a month-long experiment.
Plagued by glitches last fall, a mobile app for meter payments now accounts for about 10 percent of revenues, Fox said. That service will continue. The authority’s first website, coming soon, eventually should enable online payments for permits and tickets, Fox added.
But the $17 million, five-level parking deck proposed behind the Morristown Post Office will have to wait–maybe forever.
Contemplated since at least 2015, ostensibly to help the Mayo Performing Arts Center, the deck was pitched to the town council in December 2019–only months before the pandemic shut down the theater and everything else.
“It’s on hold,” Fox said of the garage. “We’re in recovery mode…. we need to focus on immediate needs.”
Still unclear is how many telecommuters will return to their Morristown offices–or whether the MPA will be stuck with a glut of spaces–when COVID-19 finally relents. Estimated construction costs, meanwhile, have escalated by “millions,” Fox said.
While refinancing helped the authority make its debt payments through the pandemic, the MPA is in no position to build another garage, she said.
“We wouldn’t be received by the market very well right now. So we don’t have the capabilities to finish the project at this point,” Fox said. “We’ll wait until the time is right, and revenues are where they need to be, and the necessity and the need is there.”
For now, her priority is replacing the entry system that controls gates and records payments for the existing garages. The system is about 14 years old, and the vendor won’t support its software much longer, Fox said.
Many competing technologies must be compared. She anticipates bidding the project this year, for installation in 2023.
“So that’s our focus for 2022. We have to fund that and get that up and going,” Fox said.
RIGHT DIRECTION?
After “a lot of maneuvering to keep things afloat” –including employee furloughs, and tapping money earmarked for the new garage — things appeared headed in the right direction as last year wound down, Fox said.
Companies and individuals with reserved parking had been allowed to hold onto their permits during the pandemic. Asked to re-evaluate their plans in September, a majority indicated they will return; Morris County employees working from home are expected back this month, Fox said.
For a couple of well attended Mayo shows in November, MPA facilities nearly reached capacity, she noted.
Then Omicron hit. December’s revenue figures were not available yet, Fox said. But she observed a “huge dropoff” in downtown foot traffic in the two-week run-up to Christmas.
“I hope that this variant is just a little skip we have to overcome,” she said.
‘EVERYBODY IS JUST STRESSED OUT’
The pandemic has not been Fox’s only challenge. She was tasked with succeeding a key player in Morristown’s revitalization.
A few things eased her transition. For starters, she had known Michael Fabrizio, from his other executive gig in Pompton Lakes. So she grasped what his loss meant to employees and associates.
Retired MPA Executive Director George Fiore also was a valuable resource, Fox said.
“They did a fantastic job of getting this organization up and keeping it going. And, you know, all l see is picking up what they did and continuing with it,” she said.
She described her approach this way:
“I believe in fairness, and I’m looking for fairness to be applied across the board with the organization, which it has been,” she said. “That’s my style.”
She credits some of that to her late uncle, longtime Morris County Sheriff John Fox.
“While my uncle ran as a Republican, he and his staff treated everyone, without regard to political affiliation, equally and with respect,” she said.
One of her first acts at the MPA was seeking her board’s blessing for a voluntary employee assistance program, in conjunction with Atlantic Health. Similar to a program she knew in Passaic County, this one includes counseling services and job coaching.
“These times that we’re in, I think everybody is just stressed out, you know?” Fox said.
“Surprisingly, what I’ve learned from our employee assistance program is that it’s not work that’s stressing people out. It’s everything outside of work. So if we can help our employees in that way, I think it’s fantastic. And I think it only helps people to be better employees.”
Fox said she intends to continue MPA traditions such as free garage parking for Morristown residents during snowstorms. Parking also was free last week when First Night Morris celebrated its 30th New Year’s Eve.
Getting acclimated did not take long for the Parsippany resident. A short walk from her Maple Avenue office is Assumption Church, where she was married, and Assumption School, which she attended as a girl. Her high school also was nearby, on the grounds of Saint Elizabeth University in Morris Township.
“We were meeting in Morristown before it was a ‘Meet Me in Morristown’ thing,” Fox said with a laugh.
Chart: Morristown Parking Authority Rate Increases, January 2022. The DeHart Street garage also has become a 24-hour, seven-day-per-week facility:
