Higher-level parking

First of all, yes, Missoula Parking Services Director Jodi Pilgrim does indeed get parking tickets. More than a few, in fact.

“I have more than 30 tickets on my record,” she admits.

On most days, Pilgrim walks to and from her job at the Parking Commission Office on Main Street — she knows the value of a downtown parking spot and doesn’t think it should be wasted on her car. But on the days she drives, paying for parking sometimes just slips her mind.

“I just forget to pay. Or I forget to extend my time. I’m thinking of other things,” she explains, then adds with a smile, “I’m thinking of higher-level parking. Not my parking in the moment.”

Pilgrim does seem to think about higher-level parking a lot. Even during our interview, she’s between sessions at an international parking conference in Milwaukee, excited about making connections there and collecting ideas from other cities’ programs.

“We all joke in this industry that parking is not something where you grow up saying, I’m going to grow up and do parking. But if you get into parking, you just never want to get out,” she says.

Eleven years ago, Pilgrim was working on a physics degree at the University of Montana when she applied to be an entry-level administrative assistant at the Parking Commission, with no plan for a lifelong career. But over the past decade, she rose through the office, eventually becoming business manager and then, two and a half years ago, parking services director.

“It’s the most interesting and exciting industry and it’s a way that you can help make your city work behind the scenes and it’s just really, really cool,” she beams. “And that’s why I stay in it.”

Cool, maybe. Contentious, definitely. Few topics rev up residents and downtown business owners like parking, and — fair or not — a year of changes in rules, rates and reach have plenty of people panning the parking police.

None of it is really about asphalt. It’s about who gets to be downtown, who pays for it, and whose convenience counts.

Last summer, Missoula City Council doubled fines for repeat violators and, in the University District, hiked residential permit costs from $45 to $65 a year. Objectors said it penalized people already paying steep property taxes to park near their own homes.

In the fall, the Council expanded the Parking Commission’s jurisdiction into the Hip Strip, bringing paid parking to a stretch of the city that’s never had it. Business owners worry it’ll scare off the quick-stop customers who park, run in, and leave. And some nearby residents — many in apartments without dedicated parking, like the Montaignes — fear losing the free, informal parking that’s their only real option.

Meanwhile, in January, Missoula became the first city in Montana to drop parking minimums for new development. It’s part of a broader zoning code rewrite — spurred by state legislation — meant to clear away rules that have made housing slower and more expensive to build.

And now, coming down the pike is a major makeover of downtown. The $24.5 million Downtown Safety, Access and Mobility Project, or SAM, will narrow Higgins from four lanes to three, convert Front and Main to two-way streets, and cut parking on at least one side of the Hip Strip. It’s all about making it easier to get around downtown, whether you’re driving, biking or walking. If not the redesign itself, then the roughly three years of construction it requires — which could begin by year’s end — is stoking anxieties around Missoula’s parking pinch.

None of it is really about asphalt. It’s about who gets to be downtown, who pays for it, and whose convenience counts. The Pulp sat down with Pilgrim to talk about all things parking — the changes coming to Missoula parking, why people get so heated about it, and, yes, her own ticket habit.

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The Pulp: What do you love about parking?

Jodi Pilgrim: Parking touches all aspects of the community. We have a great bus system in the city. We have decent bike infrastructure in our city that’s getting better. We also have decent walkability. But in many situations, even if you are also walking or biking, you’re starting your journey with parking by pulling out of a parking space and you’re ending with parking by pulling into a parking space.

And it feels like this little thing, but when it’s not done right and it’s not done well, it becomes this big and very impactful thing on people’s lives and it impacts our local businesses downtown. If people can’t get to their favorite restaurant — if you can’t get to Zoo Thai or Brasserie Porte Rouge — then that restaurant won’t continue to exist.

What do you want every Missoulian to know about parking in Missoula?

Parking management in the city of Missoula is about access and getting people to where they need or want to be. The goal is not to make money and it is not to be punitive enforcers of nonsense policies.

Our jurisdiction is limited. We have the central business district, which is the downtown area. We have our newly expanded area, which is the Hip Strip, and then we have the residential area around the University of Montana. Management in those areas looks different because the need for access in those areas is different.

What big parking changes are coming to Missoula that you want people to know about?

The big changes coming to parking have been in the works for a couple of years now. We adopted our five-year parking plan in June 2024.

One big change coming out of that is a virtual permit management program. Currently, we have lots and structures that have traditionally been restricted to people who have a monthly or a long-term lease, and that’s not an equitable way to manage parking. So through adoption of this, we will be able to say, for example, although this lot is leased to capacity and all the spots are spoken for, it regularly has 40 percent of its spaces open. We should allow other people to come here and park in those spaces as they need.

We are also going gateless in our garages. The garages are for everyone and the gates create a physical barrier to access that people oftentimes see as uninviting — that it’s a place that’s not for them. But the garages are for everyone.

We will switch over to license plate recognition enforcement, which is called “Free Flow” in the parking industry. People can come into the garage and park their vehicles and leave the garage without having to wait for an arm to raise up and down in front of their vehicle. It’s not free parking. It’s still $1 an hour and the first hour is free, but it’s just a better way to access the facility.

You said the goal isn’t to make money — can you tell me roughly how much the Commission brings in annually from tickets and permits, and where that revenue goes?

Our goal is not to generate revenue from tickets because focusing on generating revenue from tickets creates a culture that is more punitive and less educational. It disincentivizes encouraging people to follow parking rules.

Our total operating revenue is around $3.4 million. Ticket revenue is 7 to 8 percent of that total and permit fees and meter fees make up 82 percent. Our revenues mainly go to salaries for our staff of 13 and maintaining our parking assets (lots, garages, meters, etc.). This upcoming fiscal year, we have created a new budget line item to start addressing some deferred maintenance in our garages.

Three percent of our revenue is set aside for grants and contributions to organizations and programs that fit with our mission — we contribute to Missoula in Motion, Missoula Ravalli Transportation Management Association, the Business Improvement District, Missoula Downtown Foundation and others.

Can you talk about how parking will be affected by Downtown SAM?

SAM is a huge project that will make some large, cool moves toward greater access downtown. It’s not a parking project, but I am on the project leadership team and can speak to the parking piece.

As of right now, we will be losing some on-street parking spaces downtown through the conversions of the lanes.

There are several parking spaces downtown right now that are non-conforming, which means that they don’t fit with current standards and they’re not necessarily safe spaces. This project will bring all of the parking stalls into conformity.

What we’re looking at right now is 104 spaces that would be removed from the downtown inventory. And there was a parking study that was done as part of this design process that showed that there were around 2,500 spaces in the project area. So we’re looking at about 4 percent of the spaces that will be lost. That doesn’t worry me as the parking director because I see how underutilized some of our lots and structures are and I see more than 104 spaces that are open and available to the public. The public just needs to know where they are and how to get to them. It’s our job to improve that.

What are Missoula’s biggest parking concerns right now to you? What’s on your mind when you’re getting those tickets?

I think a lot about the new zoning that’s gone into place to react to the growth that Missoula is seeing. The necessary zoning to build more housing to create better density housing and more types of housing has — and this is based on the state and so it wasn’t something that Missoula just elected to do — but there are no longer any parking minimums for developments. This means that you can build housing, you can build hotels, you can build lots of different residential complexes, basically without building any parking to support them.

Industry-wise, that’s the way that we should be doing it — and also Missoula is unique.

People live here for lots of different reasons. One of those reasons is recreation. And so unlike a place like New York City or Seattle where you might not need a car and you can get to everything that you need without one, people tend to live in Montana and drive cars. People tend to need cars in Montana in a way that they don’t need them in other places — and you can’t build more space in the public right-of-way. So the on-street parking that we have downtown is static, it’s finite, it’s what we have.

As the community continues to grow and our downtown — which is thriving — continues to see more people, the parking resources don’t grow at the same rate.

And so as the community continues to grow and our downtown — which is thriving — continues to see more people, the parking resources don’t grow at the same rate. That’s something that I think about a lot right now.

What has been your biggest challenge?

Culture shift. When I started, there was quite a bit of push back to change. The phrase “but that’s the way we’ve always done it” was common and balancing the message that the old way wasn’t bad or wrong with the need to change was a big challenge.

How bad should someone feel if they get a parking ticket?

Oh, not super bad. Getting a parking ticket doesn’t have to do with your character. It happens to everybody.

Some people get them and some people don’t. We try to design our parking tickets and our fines to be educational. The first ticket is free. And we are forgiving. If you get a safety violation, for example, our staff will try and work with you to educate you about what you did and how you can avoid it in the future. The tickets do escalate now. Call us, find out what you did and avoid it in the future because it will get more expensive after that.

What keeps you up at night about parking?

What I’ve been caring a lot about recently is our expansion into the Hip Strip and equitable access around Hellgate High School. It’s such a tricky spot and it’s a spot that we want everyone to have access to. We want students to be able to go to school. We want parents to be able to come and volunteer. We want the specialists that move between the three high schools to be able to come and access Hellgate just as easily as they access Big Sky High School and just as easily as they access Sentinel High School. But Hellgate High School doesn’t have the same parking resources that Sentinel and Big Sky have.

I went there and my son went there and my grandmother went there a million years ago and there’s always been parking problems. I loved going there because we were so close to downtown and it felt like we were right in the center of everything, but it’s not without its challenges.

What’s the most absurd parking complaint you’ve ever gotten from a Missoulian?

For as long as I have worked here, the most interesting complaint I hear is about the $0 warning ticket. We even had someone take a $0 ticket to municipal court to contest it because they wanted to save it for a time when they “needed it”. The $0 warning for meter and overtime violations resets every 180 days that a vehicle goes without receiving one of those violations. But, for some reason, the angriest people I have ever dealt with are people who are mad that they received the $0 ticket.

So … did you pay those 30 parking tickets?

I pay on time and in full. I pay them because my staff would make fun of me for the rest of my life if they got to boot my vehicle.