Taos officials: Paid parking is back — this time for good

TAOS — The Tuesday Morning store that Ruthann McCarthy and her family once owned behind Taos Plaza closed years back, but the weather-beaten parking lot that previously served its customers was packed with cars again this past week.

Only, it wasn’t nostalgia for the now exclusively online home goods retailer that drew them there — it was the free parking.

After roughly a decade, when visiting downtown by car was effectively free due to broken meters and lax enforcement, the town of Taos began enforcing use of new paid parking kiosks on Monday, Aug. 4.

Except for free two-hour street parking on Bent Street, Civic Plaza Drive, Paseo del Pueblo Norte and Kit Carson Road, drivers must now pay $2.25 for the first hour of parking, if paying by card, and $1 for an additional hour using new parking kiosks stationed across several downtown lots, including Taos Plaza. Paid parking runs Monday through Saturday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Violators will be fined $25.

Roughly 250 parking spaces will remain free at Town Hall, Taos Public Library, Bedford Street Lot, Kit Carson Park, Kit Carson Street Parking and Quesnel Street.

For now, though, McCarthy’s privately owned lot remains the most proximate workaround for locals and tourists who don’t want to pay — a safe harbor for those who believe parking should remain gratis in and around Taos’ historic square, which was founded in the late 18th century.

“We got 2,500 signatures from community members who were against any of the kiosks,” McCarthy said, speaking to the Journal at a table inside Legacy Cafe, which she’s operated with her partner, local radio host Brad Hockmeyer, in the southeast corner of Taos Plaza since last summer. “They are considering the plaza a parking lot. It’s not a parking lot.”

In 2020, McCarthy co-founded Taos Roundtable, which grew out of informal community conversations she hosted with other concerned locals who gathered inside Casa Benavides Inn, which her family owns on Kit Carson Road.

They meet once a week, offering engaged locals a place to freely voice their ideas outside the confines of public meeting agendas. They’ve shown up regularly to town council and planning meetings to protest tree removals and changes to historic spaces, for example.

But more recently, the specter of paid parking in central Taos has been a core concern for the roundtable. They believe reintroducing paid parking after so many years creates an unnecessary expense, a barrier for local merchants, their employees and visitors that could dampen economic activity downtown.

Meanwhile, local government officials have argued that paid parking is a neglected source of revenue necessary to maintain the Historic District and buttress the town’s finances amid ongoing economic uncertainty.

“I think we need to have revenue coming from somewhere to pay for a lot of the maintenance that we do downtown, and if it wasn’t coming from parking fees, we’d have to find it from somewhere else in the budget,” said Darien Fernandez, who grew up in Taos and has been a town councilor since March 2020. “We had paid parking in some form in the downtown area for at least 30 years, from the time I was a teenager putting a quarter in the machine. I think the current plan is a good compromise.”

Previous estimates have pegged annual parking revenues as high as $200,000, but Fernandez says the town now projects the kiosks will generate between $100,000 to $120,000 in fees and fines each year. He says the town pays roughly $50,000 in leasing costs alone for the lots it maintains downtown.

Taos Mayor Pascual Maestas, whose term in office expires this year, and a former town manager began drawing up plans in 2024 to restore paid parking to the Historic District, where many local merchants operate, forming an important pillar of the Taos economy that generates a lion’s share of gross receipts tax revenues.

Officials faced a maelstrom of pushback after town workers tore out individual coined meters and replaced them with the ATM-shaped kiosks that parkers now congregate around downtown, waiting for their turn to pay.

The public outcry precipitated a series of stops and starts for the paid parking rollout as the town worked to come up with a solution locals would tolerate over the last year and a half.

For example, town officials agreed to a temporary pause to paid parking as a major state road reconstruction project wrapped up along the town’s main thoroughfare late this spring. The town also offers discounted parking passes for locals and business owners through its website, taosnm.gov.

Some locals say they’re willing to pay to park or are even grateful to have a deterrent to car campers who occupy spaces sometimes all day — it’s the kiosks themselves they find confusing to operate.

Unlike paid parking meters of old that stand ready to receive coins at individual parking spots, Taos’ new parking solution often serves entire lots alone or in pairs. Once located, the kiosks require parkers to enter their license plate number before providing payment, with some saying they have to return to their cars to recall the digits on the plate.

“There’s a lot of local elderly people that still don’t understand the new system, and that’s the problem, you know?” said Oclides Gutierrez, a local woman who parked in Taos Plaza on Thursday evening for weekly concert series Taos Plaza Live. “They should have just fixed the old meters.”

Many New Mexico towns enforce paid parking, but often employ a modernized version of the traditional coined meter. In nearby Santa Fe, for example, individual meters make use of the Parkmobile App. Beyond revenue generation, paid parking can help reduce congestion and offer valuable data on visitorship.

So far in Taos, however, the revival of paid parking has in some ways proven to be a study in how people tend to rebel when required to pay for something they once enjoyed for free.

The week enforcement resumed, Taos Police officers made their way around the Historic District to remind visitors of the new parking enforcement policy. They even offered tutorials on how the new kiosks function — until some technical challenges arose.

“We’ll be showing people how they work. We’re trying to get to as many lots as we can,” officer Jake Padilla told the Journal at a kiosk in John Dunn Shop’s parking lot on Wednesday as shoppers ambled in the summer heat.

A man approached with the same question many Taos residents have had to stop and ask since last year: “Do we have to pay today?”

“Well, it’s supposed to be today,” Padilla told him, “but we’re having issues. Right now, (the kiosk) has to reboot. It’s going to be a while.”