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The City Council is considering extending the hours Town Square customers must pay for parking.

City staff on Monday recommended that paid parking be extended to weeknights and Saturdays.

Patrons currently pay between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. weekdays.

City Manager Scott Ullery said the added revenue is needed to repay money borrowed to construct the garages. That money is currently coming out of the tax-generated general fund.

"The general fund money … is the same money we use to pay our police officers, maintain our parks, pay our planning staff and run the city government," Ullery said. "… It's a not a question of will the garages be paid for, but it's a question of how they will be paid for, and that's the fundamental question here."

Ullery said the city will supplement the parking fund with $950,000 transferred from the general fund this fiscal year.

Several owners of Town Square businesses opposed extending paid parking hours during the Citizen's Forum portion of Monday's meeting, saying their businesses are already hurting due to the struggling economy, and that they also saw a drop in sales and foot traffic when the city began charging for parking.

If approved, paid parking in the Town Square parking garages and meters would be required from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

While the council did not vote on that recommendation, it unanimously adopted other recommendations to reduce monthly parking rates from $85 to $75 and increase rates for on-street parking meters near the Twinbrook Metro station from 25 cents to 50 cents per hour.

The monthly parking changes will begin Nov. 1 and the meter changes will begin on Dec. 1.

The council also voted to allow patrons to pay for an unlimited number of hours at one time instead of the four-hour limit now in place.

Councilman John B. Britton was absent on Monday.

The more than $818,887 in projected revenue would not completely pay the city's debt service, but would help close the gap, said Burt Hall, the city's director of recreation and parks.

City staff project that the parking garages will cost more than $4 million in fiscal 2009. Last fiscal year, the city projected a $950,000 general transfer to support the parking fund and ended the fiscal year transferring more than $1.5 million.

Alan Gozhansky, owner of Town Square Jewelers on Gibbs Street, said he and another business owner counted the number of people who visited their stores and saw a 30 percent to 40 percent drop the week the city started charging for parking.

"If you continue and increase the hours and start charging for parking on weekends, it's just going to get worse," Gozhansky told council members Monday.

Council members tossed around ideas to supplement costs somehow, from offering the first hour free or having stores validate parking.

Hall said that 60 percent of garage revenue comes from the first hour of parking.

David Levy, Rockville's chief of long-range planning, said Town Square businesses may offer parking validation in the form of direct refunds to their customers.

Gozhansky said after the meeting that he has at times given his customers coins to feed the meters to keep them in the stores. But Sari Bloch, owner of Bobby's Crabcakes on Gibbs Street, said she would have to think about it, saying the last three months have been the toughest time her restaurant has seen.

"They didn't make their projections based on this economy," Bloch said.

Councilwoman Anne M. Robbins suggested further delaying expanding paid parking to see if there is an upturn in the economy.

"The stories really tug at my heart. We get the impression people could go under and that's a terrible thing," Robbins said. "… But what happens is every taxpayer then really pays for the parking because we're taking it out of the general fund and that's not fair either."

Caya Cagri, owner of The Cottage Monet, said the businesses have already been riding out their struggles with the delays in construction and failure of the road pavers.

"I think they have to see it from a retailer's perspective," Cagri said. "Right now, we're facing a hard time … now's not the time to do this."

The city always expected to defer part of the garage expenses by charging users. But the council has been slow to charge, delaying fee implementation scheduled to start in spring 2007 because of construction troubles on Town Square roads, other technical delays and a corresponding slowdown in retail openings.

In spring 2006, the City Council originally set the rates for the parking garages at $1 per hour from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays. But in January, when the council voted to begin charging in March, council members scaled back the hours to end at 7 p.m.

Council members will revisit the expansion of paid parking at a later meeting for a full discussion with Britton.