DDA Awards Incentive to Republic Parking

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At its Feb. 1, 2012 meeting, the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority board approved a management incentive under the terms of its contract with Republic Parking, which manages day-to-day operations of the public parking system. The board voted to award $45,000 out of the $50,000 that it can award on a discretionary basis. The other $150,000 of the $200,000 total incentive is not discretionary, and is paid to Republic monthly.

The management incentive is paid based on customer satisfaction surveys and independent inspections of the parking facilities. The free responses section of the survey included a range of sentiments, from enthusiastic praise of specific Republic Parking employees (“Staff is always very friendly” and “Teri and Cathy are the greatest!!”), complaints about employee job performance (“I don’t pay $12-$13 a day to be inconvenienced because your employees can’t get their job done timely!”), praise for the facilities (“Very clean and nice art work on ground floor at curved wall on the southeast comer”) and criticism of the facilities (“Please clean more. And take care of the awful smell on floor 4″). Sprinkled through the responses are complaints about parking rates. [.pdf of parking customer responses]

The rating scale responses of the survey broke down as follows: 5-Excellent (36.5%), 4 (26.3%), 3 (14.0%), 2 (9.5%), 1-Poor (6.7%), Non-Responsive (6.9%). Last year the same survey yielded the following results: 5-Excellent (22.5%), 4 (32.3%), 3 (17.9%), 2 (4.6%), 1-Poor (2.2%), Non-Responsive (20.1%). So the number of survey respondents giving a rating of 5 or 4 increased from 54.8% to 62.8%. The rating of 1 or 2 also increased, from 6.8% to 16.2%. Around 600 people responded to the survey.

The DDA’s independent parking inspector made 48 written reports to evaluate the cleanliness of the facilities systemwide last year. Average for the year was 90.48%, which is a three-point drop from last year’s score of 93.7%.

In the previous three years (2009, 2010, and 2011), the DDA board voted to award the same $45,000 incentive: [link]