By @MarioCruz
Does the City of Miami Parking Authority and the mayor want to kill new tech and business in Wynwood?
As Wynwood has become a very vibrant spot for tech companies, most have moved in around The Lab Miami area, companies like LiveNinja, LearnerNation and the one I co-founded, Choose Digital. The city, the head of Miami Parking Authority Art Noriega, the director of Planning and Development Rolando G. Tapanes and Mayor Tomás Regalado have now officially made it harder on startups and startups’ employees.
Here is what has happened over the last six months: First, they changed the hours on the street meters from ending at 5pm to 2am. This change happened without warning. During a Code for Miami meetup, a group helping to create apps and solution to government problem, volunteers started to be ticketed and found out about the change then.
Now the City has removed all the monthly decal parking inside of Wynwood and has only left decal parking on Nw 6th Avenue alongside I-95 and the streets in between Nw 5th and 6th Avenue, not a safe place at night, unlike 23rd - 27th Street between 2nd and 5th Avenue, which are patrolled by security.
This leaves only metered parking on the streets in front of our businesses. To keep our employees parking on our safer block, our parking price per employee will now go from $55 a month to $200 – a 265% change in one month.
However the problems continue. Besides paying the $145 extra, you cannot pay for a day parking pass. You can only buy 120 min at a time. This requires employees to walk to the meter every 2 hours or use an app that charges you an extra $.35 a transaction for an extra 1.75 a day. Bringing your new total to $235 a month a 330% increase.
I think this needs to get fixed immediately.
Mario Cruz is the CTO of Choose Digital, headquartered in Wynwood. Mario's previous guest post is here.