Great Falls provides new free parking option in city parking garages

GREAT FALLS, Mont. - The city of Great Falls parking garages will now have free parking for the first two hours.

After that, $1.50 will be charged. This is the next phase of parking fees that’s going into effect today in the great falls downtown area.

City officials say this new option is a step in the right direction to manage parking.

“I mean parking has always been an issue. It's always been a problem and ultimately, there's no magic solution to parking. It's how can we manage it better,” said Jeremy Jones, City of Great Falls deputy city manager.

Great Falls is the latest Montana city to boost its free options.

Following cities like Bozeman, with its more than 3,500 spaces with two free hours of parking, and Missoula, where some streets offer up to a full hour before payment is required.

And not to mention, Billings and Helena where parking is free after 5:00 p.m. and on the weekends.

Here in Great Falls, the downtown Parking Summit Group identified aging infrastructure, outdated technology, confusing parking rules and a poor perception of parking garages, as the city's main challenges in its parking system

To help remedy this, the city commission created interim parking rules, increasing curbside rates from $1.00 to $1.50, as  well as the final price tag of parking tickets.

Right now, the city is pushing to make these rules permanent and is recommending the city commission to invest up to $2.5 million of downtown TIF funding.

But Jones said the next phase will take some time before the community sees further improvement.

“Our goal is to hopefully know what that plan is in August of this year and then begin to whittle away at that and start to address the infrastructure issues and to start to implement what technology that the group chooses to move forward with,” said Jones.

Jones adds he hopes more people start taking advantage of the free two hours of parking Great Falls is offering, bringing more business to the downtown area.