GREEN BAY (NBC 26) — The Improvement and Services Committee of Green Bay voted unanimously on Wednesday to recommend approval of a resolution to double the rates on parking ramps in downtown Green Bay during the NFL Draft.
The committee met on Wednesday evening. The resolution proposes the parking ramp rates to double — from $1 per hour (maximum of $12/day) to $2/hour (maximum of $24/day) — during the three days when the City will be hosting the NFL draft.
All members of the committee voted in favor of the resolution. The Green Bay City Council will have the final vote when it meets next Tuesday.
Steve Grenier, Green Bay's Director of Public Works, spoke at the meeting to explain the reasoning behind the increase proposed in the resolution.
"As we identified in the staffing report, parking in downtown is limited, especially in times of high demand. And this special event, the 2025 NFL Draft, is going to create additional demand," Grenier said. "With that demand, extra assistance for parking patrons and extra enforcement, security and monitoring through the ramps is going to be necessary due to that higher than expected traffic."
"We're not going to get rich on this," Grenier added. "It's three days. So what we're looking to do is just simply to help absorb some of that extra cost that we're going to expand with staff."
According to Grenier, other options were considered to spread out the cost increase — including an increase on the meter rates, but since one of the payment options for the meters are coins, they would have to physically open the meter mechanism and reprogram each and every meter for just those 3 days, and then go back and reprogram them back after the event.
"So the juice was not worth the squeeze on the meters," Grenier said.
