The Town of The Blue Mountains and Blue Mountain Resorts are teaming up on an initiative to keep visitors more informed about parking conditions around the village area.
At its committee of the whole meeting on Dec. 9, The Blue Mountains council approved a staff report that recommended moving forward with a project in partnership with Blue Mountain Resort to set up digital parking signs on local and county roads around the Blue Mountain Village.
The digital signs would provide real time counts of available parking space at the village’s various lots to drivers seeking a parking space in the area.
At the meeting, council received a delegation from resort President Dan Skelton about the initiative.
Skelton explained that parking at Blue Mountain is designed to handle the resort’s peak days. He said currently the resort has sufficient parking.
“We’ve never had a day where we’re completely parked out,” he said.
With future growth coming to the village area, Skelton said the resort is looking at ways to improve parking management and the visitor experience.
“This is kind of an ongoing challenge for us,” he said.
Skelton said the resort would like to implement digital parking signs on local and county roadways that would better inform visitors to the resort and the village of current parking conditions.
However, there is one problem, the town’s sign bylaw does not allow digital signs of any kind. He said the new signs would be fully funded by the resort - they are not asking for any town money for the project - but do require an exemption to the sign bylaw.
In a report to council, Tim Hendry – the town’s director of strategic initiatives – recommended council support the project and grant the exemption.
“This is a great opportunity to look at a private sector/municipal partnership,” said Hendry.
The town’s sign bylaw, Hendry noted, is “very prescriptive” in its prohibition on digital signs. However, he explained that the language in the bylaw is clearly directed towards signs that would be using video to advertise products and/or businesses. He said in this case, the signs would be static and contain information about parking conditions in and around the village area.
Hendry said the resort would still be required to go through the full approval process to locate the signs on town and county road allowances and said staff would report back a year after the signs were installed with information about their effectiveness.
Council unanimously approved the project.
