On September 4th, Kirkwood City Council unanimously voted down a contract with a local company, Fybr, for a technological solution that aimed to address the parking issue in Downtown Kirkwood. I was disappointed by that decision because I’ve long been a fan of Kirkwood’s previous adoption of the technology and especially its long-term potential. The more concerning aspect of the affair, however, is that, in voting down the proposal, the Council didn’t really seem to know what they were voting on, nor did they have any sort of clear alternative in mind.
Fybr: An Overview
Fybr specializes in placing hockey puck-sized sensors under individual parking spaces to offer real-time occupancy data. That data can then be used in several ways. Fybr transmits this real-time parking availability map to their mobile app, Park Kirkwood, which allows visitors to quickly navigate to an available spot.
This real-time data (which transmits every two minutes or so) can also be used by the Kirkwood Police Department to be alerted when a vehicle has stayed past the 2-hour limits and 15-minute limits that are posted for many of the Downtown Kirkwood spots. Kirkwood’s parking attendants currently monitor those parking limits by pen and notepad, a labor-intensive process leading to fairly inconsistent enforcement.
The Compounding Mistake
Fybr originally signed a contract with Kirkwood to install and maintain 275
parking sensors in the downtown area at no cost for the period from December
3, 2020 to December 2, 2021 to serve as a sort of local proof of concept for the company. Kirkwood got a good product for free and Fybr could show off their tech in action to people visiting their Chesterfield headquarters on business. A win-win.
For whatever reason, city staff badly bungled their account of this history when presenting the new contract proposal to the council. The Legislation Request included on pg. 127 of the Council’s 9/4/25 agenda, written by head of Kirkwood Electric, Mark Petty, attempts to describe the history of the original agreement between Fybr and the city, but instead of describing 275 spots for a cost of $0 to the city, Petty instead claims that this original demonstration contract was for just 69 spots and came at a cost of $14,973 to the city.
We know, however, that on this point, the city’s documents are mistaken:
- Here is a May 2021 St. Louis Public Radio interview with Chief Administrative Officer, Russ Hawes and Fybr’s Chief Commercial Officer at the time, Matt Willenbrink (remember that name, it will come back up), stating clearly that the original deal was for 275 spots, and at the six-minute mark of the interview, that those 275 spots came at no cost to Kirkwood
- Here is article I wrote on Kirkwood’s agreement with Fybr shortly thereafter. That article includes a screenshot of the Park Kirkwood app that also clearly shows more than 69 spots being monitored by the sensors
- And here is a copy of the original contract between Fybr and Kirkwood clearly outlining 275 spots for $0
Unfortunately, this seemingly small mistake compounded and triggered several subsequent mistakes and misunderstandings throughout the process.
Renewal of Talks
To return to the narrative, though, by December 2nd 2021, the original contract had run out without the city picking up the service/maintenance fee that was required for renewal in year two. At this point, as per the language of the contract, the ownership of the hardware and responsibility for any maintenance of the system was transferred to the city at no cost.
Fybr says they then contacted the city to ascertain whether Kirkwood wanted Fybr to remove the sensors that had been previously installed in city streets, but received no formal response until January of 2025, when the City requested that Fybr re-activate the system.
At that time, Fybr says they assessed the state of the system and noted that many of the “gateways” (essentially antennas that pick up data from the sensors and transmit it to the city / the Park Kirkwood app) went offline. Fybr suspected that this was due to issues with power outlets on the poles the gateways were mounted on, but since the city had let the original contract lapse and had assumed ownership and maintenance of the hardware themselves, Fybr had not noticed the issue as it was no longer within its purview.
According to Fybr, loss of communication between the gateways and the sensors caused the sensors to continually and unsuccessfully attempt to transmit data to the gateways, thus eating away at the sensors’ battery life at a much higher than average rate, thus diminishing their operational lifespan.
Fybr informed the city of this issue and noted that as a result, only a portion of the original sensors had sufficient remaining battery life to warrant reactivation. Having received this info, Kirkwood requested that Fybr identify the sensors with the highest remaining battery lives and use them to replace dead sensors on Argonne between Clay and Kirkwood Rd until a more formal contract could be agreed upon for the full reactivation of the system. Fybr identified 69 of the original 275 sensors that had sufficient remaining battery life and agreed to relocate them for a fee of $14,973.
This amount is seemingly the origin of the “less than $15,000” that had been wrongly listed as the cost of the original Fybr-Kirkwood contract in Mr. Petty’s Legislation Request and the “$14,973” that was mistakenly included in the 2025 resolution itself. The full context as to why the original sensors had degraded more rapidly than their advertised seven-year lifespan was not included in the official agenda.
With an agreement to temporarily relocate the 69 remaining original sensors, the City and Fybr commenced work on a new contract between the City and Fybr to re-activate the full system.
The result of those negotiations was an agreement for Fybr to install 215 of their latest model of sensors (slightly less than the original 2020 contract’s 275 due to the fact that the train station parking lot is still under construction) for an initial fee of $53,750 for the sensors themselves and their installation, and $24,420 annually in maintenance, software licensing, and warranty costs, for a total cost of $78,170. Those figures are outlined on pg. 137 of the 9/4/25 Council agenda:
For some reason though, the cost listed in the actual contract resolution that the Council voted on, however, was instead inaccurately listed at $102,590. Patrick Stephens, the CEO of Fybr noted this inaccuracy to the Council at the August 7th Council meeting, but Mr. Petty countered that his reasoning for listing the $102,590 figure was that if the City decided to add sensors to the (currently under construction) Kirkwood Train Station parking lot, the additional money included in that figure would be needed in this same fiscal year, and thus it was better to get approval for the full amount now.
This discrepancy clearly confused the Council, and a while later (at the 1:28:38 mark of the live stream), Council Member Zimmer asks Mr. Petty directly if the $102,590, should instead be corrected to $78k and Mr. Petty again says “No. Because if we do the train station in the spring before March the 31st, we’re going to have to spend that money to get those installs in and get them heated up. So, I didn’t just say, ‘Hey, we’re going to do Argonne and Jefferson and the Taylor thing.’ I’m anticipating there’s a possibility that we might have to do train station before March 31st.”
If that explanation of the cost was accurate, however, then the number of spots listed in the contract would be inaccurate and the resolution should’ve read $102,590 for 269 sensors rather than 215.
What seems more likely is that Mr. Petty erroneously included the $24,420 cost of the city’s optional second year renewal in the cost of the initial 12 month option as $53,750 + $24,420 + $24,420 = $102,590. In any case, the cost was presented as 31% more expensive than it was and just after Mr. Petty gave his explanation, the Council moved to continue the item to the, September 4th meeting, when the contract would ultimately be voted down.
In response to the Council’s concerns about the price, Fybr maintained that their product would more than make up for its cost in the form of increased revenue from parking time limit enforcement. They were so confident in this, in fact, that they offered to strike a revenue-sharing agreement with the city in which they would reduce the up-front costs in exchange for a share of the citation fees that the technology brought in. According to Fybr, no one at the city engaged them further on this offer.
Does the Product Work?
Beyond the cost, the Council also had several concerns regarding the quality of the Fybr product, citing specifically:
- Low usage of the Park Kirkwood App, which had just 1,789 downloads in five years;
- Concerns that the sensors would once again fail prematurely;
- And that the citizens of Kirkwood were against renewing the contract
Lets take these one-by-one:
Regarding low usage: While I do agree that the app was underutilized, that seems like more of a problem of the city under-marketing the app rather than a problem with Fybr’s underlying product. Posting the QR code to download the app at Downtown Kirkwood’s various parking lots seems like especially low-hanging fruit.
Regarding concerns surrounding premature failure: Fybr’s new sensors have an average lifespan of ten years, compared to the previous model’s seven-year lifespan. The lifespan question is pretty irrelevant though, because the warranty agreement that was included in the rejected contract states that Fybr would be responsible for maintaining the system and replacing any sensors should they fail prematurely.
Regarding citizen outcry: There seemed to be two citizens leading the charge against the approval of the contract of Fybr. One seemed understandably confused about the inaccurately high listed cost of the proposal and distrustful of the fact that different costs listed in different locations. The other person was Matt Willenbrink, the former Chief Commercial Officer of Fybr, who now works as the account executive for the “Parking – North America” for Genetec, a direct competitor of Fybr’s. You can watch Mr. Willenbrink’s full testimony to the Council here, but in short, he tells the Council that the Fybr app isn’t functioning correctly and expresses his concerns that perhaps that is because they have not been maintaining the system as they should have. This testimony would seem to carry some weight given that Mr. Willenbrink was involved with the original deployment of Fybr to Kirkwood. We of course now know that Fybr ceased maintaining the system in December of 2021 when the original contract lapsed and Kirkwood failed to renew, but Mr. Willenbrink may not have been privy to that information because, as he states in his testimony, shortly after striking that original agreement with Kirkwood, he parted ways with the company. In any case, these two testimonies, themselves built on misunderstandings and inaccuracies, further reinforced the Council’s suspicions of the contract based on those same misunderstandings and inaccuracies.
So What’s Next?
So we lost out on a good product by way of some combination of honest mistakes, a lack of due diligence, and perhaps a dash of plain old-fashioned stubbornness, and that sucks (especially because I had grand designs on using the Fybr tech to implement dynamically priced parking one day, thus solving the Kirkwood parking issue forever).
But the parking problem remains. In order to solve it, the City Council will have to consider two questions:
1. What is their goal? To maximize parking availability? To maximize economic productivity?
2. What tradeoffs are they willing to accept to achieve that goal? The aesthetic appeal of Downtown Kirkwood? A portion of the city budget? Political popularity?
One of the fundamental insights of the field of economics is that there are no free lunches. There are no magical solutions. Good governance is about setting priorities, weighing costs and benefits, and ultimately deciding what course of action to take. To govern is to choose. But first you have to do your homework and get your facts in a row. I do not envy the Council, but that’s the job.
Dynamic pricing is generally disliked by the general public (although it does “solve” one specific “problem”). The bigger issue/question is how desirable is downtown Kirkwood to most potential customers/sales-tax payers/non-residents? And will paying to park encourage them to take their business elsewhere?
Thanks, Jim. The nice thing about dynamic priced parking is that if demand falls as a result, you just lower the price all the way back down to $0.00 if you have to. I agree people are likely to be hostile to the idea of paying for something they were getting for “free”, but that’s why you have to pitch them on the benefits of greater parking availability, and improvements made with the revenue received. Essentially all the available evidence tells us that paid parking is good for businesses as it yields more rapid turnover of customers. But I think you’re right that some people would definitely be mad as hell.
I’ve used that parking app since i first found out about it. It does indeed let me know what spaces might be empty.
But then again, I know from living in Oakland the last 25 years and doing almost all our dining out in Kirkwood just when and where to find an empty space. So it’s not as useful, at least to residents, as we might think.
The real issue is enforcement of parking times–there’s no one going around Kirkwood and ticketing cars that have stayed beyond their limits. There used to be a person, I think from the police department, who went around chalking tires and keeping track of time limits, though how effective that was I have no idea. The sensor system that was put in place does not automatically issue a ticket for overstaying, nor does it empty the space when that happens. So it provides useful data but no enforcement and thus does not change behavior.
If we want a pay to park system, perhaps we can use Park St Louis or one of the other metering systems that use a phone-based app. I use these apps when I park in St Louis City, and we’ve even used them in other cities while traveling. But that will also require a human to monitor enforcement. These apps, in some areas, will also let you extend your paid parking time beyond the limits posted. That doesn’t free any spaces, it just charges more for the privilege of parking.
Finally, I agree with Jim Zavist that the potential of reducing the business activity in downtown if we have to pay to park every time we go there is worrisome. May not be worth what revenues are generated. Perhaps one answer would be to require pay to park only during evening dinner hours, especially since there’s so much competition for space on Argonne at Clay. Clayton requires pay to park, and several of their restaurant owners have complained this has reduced business. We frankly don’t go to Clayton for dinner because it’s so hard to park there (and we have solid options in 63122).
I think we all like technological solutions to problems, but parking enforcement will still require a human. And maybe a tow truck–
Thanks Mike. The enforcement of parking times is actually one of the primary use cases for the tech. While it doesn’t automatically issue tickets, it can direct the city’s two current parking attendants directly to the violations as soon as they occur, thus making for much more efficient enforcement than the current pen-and-pad method.
Again, the whole thing about dynamic pricing is that it’s dynamic. So prices can be higher when demand is highest (at dinner time) and lower (or even $0.00) in places and times where there is lower demand (mid morning on a Monday). That way you ensure that there’s always some parking available but also ensure that it’s not so high that it’s driving away customers. I wrote a whole article on dynamically priced parking in Kirkwood last summer if you’re interested: https://kirkwoodgadfly.com/how-to-solve-the-parking-problem-and-cut-taxes/
I’ll also add that the Fybr tech does have the ability to process payments/extend your parking if you’re running late. It’s a very versatile tech!
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