Town Council Work Session - Apr 13, 2026

meeting

Leesburg Town Council 1h 38m 2 speakers 6 agenda items transcribed 2 months ago official recording ↗

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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

Unknown 0:10

Thank you.

Unknown 1:47

Thank you.

Mayor (Presiding Council Chair) 3:01

All right, let's call tonight's April 13th, 2026 Town Council Work Session. And the first item on the discussion for tonight is the parking authority.

Keith Merkel (Staff presenter / likely Public Works or parking staff) 3:12

All right, good evening, Mayor and Council.

Unknown 3:14

Yes.

Mayor (Presiding Council Chair) 3:15

Oh, okay, I have to do that first.

Keith Merkel (Staff presenter / likely Public Works or parking staff) 3:17

Krukowski.

Mayor (Presiding Council Chair) 3:18

Okay, wait a minute, I got something here. Sorry, Mr. Dentler.

Keith Merkel (Staff presenter / likely Public Works or parking staff) 3:22

I didn't realize he was joining, I'm sorry.

Mayor (Presiding Council Chair) 3:24

Council Member Kurkowski has requested to be able to electronically participate in tonight's work session from Leesburg, Virginia. For health reasons, do I have a motion to allow Mr. Kurkowski to electronically participate? So moved. Okay, Council Member Steinberg. Second. Council Member Nacy, all in favor? Aye. Opposed? That passes 6-0-1. All right. All right, now Mr. Merkel. All right.

What background and current town parking assets does staff describe?

Keith Merkel (Staff presenter / likely Public Works or parking staff) 3:50

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor and Council. You had asked to have a work session discussion on parking authorities. And so just wanted to kind of bring this back up as something we talked about several months ago prior to the budget and CIP discussions. So we'll start out this evening with just a little bit of background to refresh all of our memories on the parking authorities, what that means and how the town came by having that authority to create one. So by background here, we have several town parking assets as we've talked about many times in different forms. one is our parking garage our town hall parking garage with around 360 parking spaces we have two public surface lots the liberty lot and the madison lot the madison lot has about 84 spaces the liberty lot has 106 spaces and then we have roughly 150 on-street pay-to-park spaces that we manage through park mobile

Keith Merkel (Staff presenter / likely Public Works or parking staff) 4:39

Our current parking operations, the management of that is distributed out over several different town departments, trying to maximize the efficiencies of the different departments that are involved with this. Parking enforcement itself is handled through the police department. They have flexible part-time staff. There are non-sworn police officers that handle all the parking enforcement on the street and in the garage and in our parking lots. The garage maintenance and lot maintenance is managed by Public Works and Capital Projects. So they'll do from time to time, the major overhauls of the garage. We have a major repair project here in our town hall garage with that concrete work that we've had.

Keith Merkel (Staff presenter / likely Public Works or parking staff) 5:12

We've had the top surface coating and we'll be finishing up here this year later with some metal replacement. And then we have parking management, which is the administrative and the financial side of things handled from our financial staff. They're the ones that are issuing the permits, the long-term monthly permits and dealing with all the mechanical equipment from the contractor vendor side of things. And then we have public work staff that handles the physical gates themselves and the electronic systems. Just this past week we had somebody overnight drive into the gate and our public works staff came out after hours to make those repairs. So it's a team effort to take care of the different assets that we have.

Keith Merkel (Staff presenter / likely Public Works or parking staff) 5:47

Parking authorities in Virginia are allowed by the discretion of the General Assembly. So as a Dillon Real Estate, they have to grant the authority to a locality. Virginia authorized Leesburg to have a parking authority back during the 2024 General Assembly session. And this is something that the town had asked for as part of its legislative program. And you'll recall this was done because at the time we were talking about that public-private partnership. with the senior affordable housing concept over in the Liberty lot. And the applicant was very much interested in the lot but needed a lease longer than 40 years. And 40 years is a statutory limit for a local government to make a lease with a private entity.

Keith Merkel (Staff presenter / likely Public Works or parking staff) 6:23

So going with that parking authority route allows you that flexibility to exceed that 40-year limit. What I did find out in doing the research when you all wanted to have this conversation is we have very few parking authorities in Virginia.