The downtown Orlando parking changes are bigger than they first appeared and the June 8 City Council vote is the public's last chance to be heard.

Here's what we've confirmed, including some details that correct the original record.

The rate increases already passed. On May 11, the City Council approved doubling on-street parking rates, doubling garage rates, and doubling event parking caps as part of the consent agenda. No separate vote. No public hearing. No notice to the downtown businesses, workers, and visitors who will pay for them. They take effect October 1. This is the first downtown parking increase in 17 years, and it was decided in the time it takes to clear a stack of routine items.

What's still up for a vote on June 8 is the rest of the ordinance: extending paid enforcement from 6 PM to 8 PM — straight through the dinner hour — and raising violation fees, with some real-world totals reaching $57.

We obtained the city's own documents. They tell the story.

The parking study is built entirely around "turnover" - moving cars faster and discouraging long visits. It treats any stay longer than four hours as something the policy is designed to discourage. A dinner and a show is four hours. A night out is more. The study never modeled what this does to the restaurants, bars, and venues that make up most of downtown after 6 PM.

The workshop where this was first presented had no business operators in the room only city officials and the staff who wrote the plan. Then the rates passed on the consent agenda, with no public hearing.

Here's the core of it: Downtown is the only one of Orlando's eleven Main Street districts with paid parking at all. Mills 50, Audubon Park, College Park, Thornton Park, the Milk District, and the rest are all free. Downtown also carries After Midnight Sales fees, a nightclub moratorium, weapons-detection requirements, and enhanced security coding that no other district faces. And now it's the only one with a six-hour progressive rate structure climbing to $22, benchmarked against Miami and Nashville — cities with rail transit Orlando doesn't have.

A downtown business owner has already publicly cited parking as the prime reason they're leaving downtown. That's before any of this takes effect.

We are not asking the city to abandon a modern parking system.

We're asking the Council to amend the June 8 ordinance:

• Keep enforcement at 6 PM, not 8 PM. The city's own employee parking discount already moves downtown workers off the street by early evening, so extending enforcement reaches customers, not workers.
• Hold violation fees at current levels.
• Apply one framework across all eleven Main Street districts, or none.
• Commission an economic impact study on downtown's restaurants, bars, and venues before any further parking changes.

Downtown is not a revenue center. It's a neighborhood. It deserves to be treated like the others.

Add your name.

Then take one more step before June 8:

• Email the City Council and your commissioner - even one sentence helps.
• Show up: City Hall, 400 S Orange Avenue, June 8, public comment opens at 2 PM.
• Share this petition with anyone who lives, works, eats, or spends time downtown.

Thank you for standing with downtown.