Clarksville, TN — For more than a year, parking your car downtown has come with a small civic gift: the first two hours are free. Shoppers like it. Restaurant owners like it. But the City of Clarksville is discovering that free parking is not, in fact, free — and the bill has landed squarely on the body that runs the lots.
At Thursday night’s meeting, the City Council took up a question that has been simmering since spring: whether to dissolve the Clarksville Parking Commission altogether and move parking enforcement under the Police Department. The debate laid bare a genuine split on the council — between members worried about the money and members worried about the merchants.
The money is real. To offer those two free hours, the Parking Commission absorbs a fee on the arrangement, and that cost has helped push the commission more than $200,000 into the red. That figure sits atop a deeper hole: the city’s parking fund has been carrying roughly $800,000 in uncollected tickets and fines, along with debt tied to building the downtown parking garages. Some council members warn that if those administrative costs keep climbing, the shortfall could eventually pull money away from other city departments — turning a parking problem into a budget problem.
The strain is physical as well as financial. Those garages add roughly 1,300 public parking spaces downtown — but F&M Bank Arena, which opened in 2023, seats up to 6,000. At two to three people per vehicle, a sold-out event would put 2,000 to 3,000 cars on the district, more than the public garages can hold. The gap only widens when people arrive one or two to a car, as they often do here. Not every attendee uses a public garage — some walk, use ride services, or park in private and university lots — but on a full arena night, demand can outrun the public spaces available and spill onto the surrounding streets.
The proposed fix is sweeping. The ordinance, sponsored by Ward 11 Councilman Joe Shakeenab, would abolish the Parking Commission — a board Shakeenab himself has served on for more than three years — and hand its duties to the Clarksville Police Department.
Under Shakeenab’s plan, CPD would issue citations, tow vehicles, and install and manage the meters and pay stations, while the council’s Finance Committee would set parking rates. Unpaid tickets, currently handled by the commission, would instead be routed to City Court. The measure also reaches beyond downtown, proposing new limits on overnight residential street parking of large commercial vehicles, buses, trailers, boats, RVs, and inoperable cars.
Shakeenab’s core argument is about enforcement teeth. As the system stands, he has contended, drivers who don’t feel compelled to pay their tickets simply don’t — there’s “no stick.” Moving the function to the police, in his view, gives the city the legal muscle to actually collect what it’s owed and to bring order to a downtown that has outgrown its old rules.
Not everyone is convinced the cure fits the moment. Ward 10 Councilwoman Stacy Streetman has raised the concern that a tougher enforcement regime could backfire on the very businesses downtown depends on. If a trip to a shop or a restaurant risks an expensive ticket, she argues, that’s hardly an incentive to draw people into the district — and the free-parking policy exists precisely to pull them in.
Others on the council have questioned whether an already-stretched police department can take on parking enforcement on top of its existing workload. A downtown business owner echoed the caution at an earlier hearing, suggesting the timing of such a change is wrong.
This is not the council’s first pass at the issue. Shakeenab initially introduced the parking overhaul in late May, with a version that would have taken effect July 1st. In June, after several council members and downtown business owners asked for more time to talk it through, the council deferred it rather than vote. The delay is why the debate is still live — and why Thursday’s meeting ended not with a decision but with a plan to keep researching how neighboring cities handle the same tension between convenience and cost.
Some history helps explain how Clarksville got here. Parking management shifted to a newly created Parking Commission back in early 2014, taking over from an earlier Parking Authority. At the time, the ordinance was built for a quieter downtown — one without the events, competing lots, and traffic the district sees today. The commission was given authority to settle disputes and set rates, but it has struggled for years to balance affordable, convenient parking against the need to actually enforce the rules and stay solvent.
Today, downtown meters and garages are enforced weekdays from 8:00am to 5:00pm, with parking free after hours, on weekends, and on city holidays, and drivers can pay by coin or through the ParkMobile app.
Where it goes next is set: the council intends to take the parking question back up at its next meeting on Thursday, August 6th — the same day Montgomery County voters head to the polls.
For downtown business owners watching to see whether their customers’ free two hours survive, and for residents weighing what stronger enforcement would mean on their own streets, that meeting is the one to watch.
