MARTINS FERRY — A special city council meeting was held on Friday morning to vote in favor of implementing meterless parking within the city.

Mayor John Davies said that council is in the infancy stages but he looks forward to the implementation.

“Obviously we’re in the infancy of getting from point A to point B, we really don’t know exactly when it’s going yet, but we’re working on council to go ahead and proceed,” Davies said. “We’ve got to look at contracts and turn them over to the law director [Paul Stecker] and have him look at them and advise us of what we need to do and go from there.”

During the Nov. 5 council meeting, Police Chief Vincent West presented the idea to council.

During that meeting he said that the new system would generate more funds for the city than the current parking meters, due to his department being so short staffed.

He added that the parking spaces would have one pay station that takes both a credit card or cash.

The city also plans to put signage throughout the city informing residents that instead of walking to the one pay station, they may either scan a QR code text number that will provide a place to pay for the parking on their phone.

“What you would do is enter your license plate number in there. It’s going to be $2 for two hours of parking and so on. But it will allow people, if they’re in a restaurant or work they are also able to pay for their parking from their phone through an app,” West previously said.

Davies said that he believes that meterless parking will draw more people to park near the local businesses in the city.

“We’re trying to help our businesses a little bit by opening up some parking to allow more shopping for Uptown. As we continue to try to grow our uptown, parking will be an issue. So that’s kind of why we’re moving forward with this aspect of it,” Davies said. ” It’s pretty sophisticated in the way that it works.”

He added that if someone parks in a spot and doesn’t pay to park there, it willl alert the police department who will have a scanner tool and an officer will then be able to ride by to see if the person paid or not.

Davies said that it would roughly cost $25,000 to replace current parking meters that are broken so he believes this is the perfect time to implement the new electronic parking meters.

He added that there currently is no exact date as to when the new system will be in place but said that council will be working diligently to ensure that it will be in place once all of the details are figured out.