Glenwood Springs City Council has repealed the $50 administrative fee it previously adopted as part of its new downtown residential parking permit policy.

The original resolution’s other rules and regulations, other than the $50 administrative fee, will remain intact, however.

Those rules, adopted earlier this year, include an allowance for 72-hour resident parking in the public lot located on Cooper Avenue between Eighth and Ninth streets.

The new policy also eliminate visitor-parking passes within the city’s general improvements district (GID); an overlay in the city’s downtown area first approved in 1980, which allows development without requiring parking, but for a fee.

Additionally, the city hopes to amend its existing agreement with Garfield County to create four-hour parking in the shared city-county parking lot at Seventh and Colorado, instead of two hours. That lot would not allow the utilization of residential parking permits.

The decision to eliminate the administrative fee for resident parking permits passed 6-1 at the regular Thursday night City Council meeting.

Mayor Michael Gamba joined by Councilors Jonathan Godes, Jim Ingraham, Shelley Kaup, Todd Leahy and Rick Voorhees supported doing away with the $50 fee.

Councilman Steve Davis, the city’s Ward 1 representative and a downtown property owner, delivered the lone dissenting vote.

Davis said ahead of the motion that he was not going to support it because the $50 was trivial and amounted to about $3,700 annually toward the Glenwood Springs Police Department for processing the permits.

“For 50 bucks a year, I can park right up at my front door in a two-hour parking zone and be left alone for three days at a time — seems like a very small price to pay,” Davis said at the meeting.

Davis said one of his constituents said to him regarding the $50 fee, “What do you think we are, Chicago?”

To which Davis indicated he replied, “No, in Chicago I would probably pay $25,000 a year for the opportunity to do that.

“This was never intended to be a parking fee,” he said. “It just happens to be the cost incurred by the police department to process the permit and to make sure that those permits hanging on the street are all appropriately used and not abused.”

mabennett@postindependent.com