Celebrating Success
By Faye Morrison
After two decades in transportation, the last 12 specifically in parking, I started to believe what everyone says-no one loves parking. In many ways, you feel separate from the community you serve, even though you provide a vital and necessary service.
When I became parking manager for the city of Newton, MA, I did not have to create everything. All the working parts for a department were there; I just had to connect them.
Medford, MA, was a whole new ball game; the parking program had to be created from policy to procedure to infrastructure, which was over a decade old. What was I thinking?
I was thinking that my years of experience and institutional knowledge could help this community achieve its stated parking goals. Late in the process, I applied, was interviewed, and hired in short succession. On October 18, 2021, I started with a staff of just me and a city study for guidance. With no substantial help from the outgoing third-party running parking, I began to manage the things I could control, finding new vendors to provide the required services.
It was bumpy, difficult, and challenging, but by January 2022, I had the first staff members on board, and training began. By March 15, 2022, we had begun processing in our new command center, including issuing tickets. With great collaboration, we had done the impossible and what every naysayer in the city said we could not in such an abbreviated period. We are up and running-well, sometimes limping, but we are here!
So, to have a prestigious organization like the International Parking and Mobility Institute acknowledge us just two short years later has been mind-boggling to me and my team.
I am still walking on air months later, and this has reminded me how important our work is and how proud we need to be of what we have built as a team. I will not let anyone make that accomplishment smaller again because what we have done is huge, and even if no one else can hear us, we know it is true!
Faye Morrison is the Parking Manager for the City of Medford, MA. She can be reached at fmorrison@medford-ma.gov.
Faye received the 2024 Professional Excellence Award for Technology and Innovation. The Call for Awards for the IPMI Professional Recognition Awards and Awards of Excellence opens September 10, 2024.
