Jim Thorpe Borough’s parking payment system is set for a makeover after the company that runs it was acquired by a national competitor.

“Our current parking system is Flowbird and it was bought out by Park Mobile, which we love, we’re glad they did it,” Police Chief Joe Schatz told council members during Thursday’s work session. “So we’re looking to switch over to Park Mobile.”

The switch cannot happen, however, until a service agreement is finalized. Borough Manager Maureen Sterner said the municipality’s solicitor has been asked to red-line the contract before it is returned to the company for revision.

“It’s a very lengthy agreement,” Sterner said.

Once the agreement is signed, Butts Ticket Systems, the borough’s current parking enforcement vendor, would handle new signage.

“New ones will go up and we’ll take the old signs down,” Schatz said.

The Park Mobile system operates on a GPS-guided zone model. Rather than feeding a coin meter or tapping a kiosk, motorists would open the Park Mobile app, enter their license plate number and the zone designation for their parking area, and pay digitally.

“With Park Mobile, it’s zones so you’ll park in a zone, and you’ll have to put that zone and your license plate into the app, or it won’t take it,” Schatz said.

That structure is designed to fix a persistent headache under the current setup: drivers parking in borough spaces but mistakenly paying at Carbon County kiosks, or vice versa.

“If you park in a borough spot and pay at a county kiosk, or the other way around, we all end up voiding tickets,” Schatz said.

The zone boundaries, he added, were the first item negotiated with Park Mobile.

“That was the first thing when we talked, I told them to stay away from the county zone numbers,” he added.

Immaculate Conception parish, which allows parking for Jim Thorpe events, adopted Park Mobile last year. James Dougher, who set up that relationship, described the app as widely used and user-friendly.

“Park Mobile is a pretty national parking app — I have it and have used it up and down the East Coast,” Dougher said.

He cautioned, however, that the platform has no ability to process refunds — a limitation that caused a headache for Immaculate Conception after a driver parked downtown accidentally charged the parish’s zone, 55599, then asked for their money back.

“We couldn’t offer them a refund through the app,” he said. “I questioned how they even found us if they were downtown and tried to use the GPS because we’re half a mile away.”

The GPS functionality embedded in the app is meant to steer users to the right zone automatically.

“If you pull out your phone and you have your GPS on, it will find exactly where you’re at,” Dougher said.

The borough’s aging physical kiosks generated the most debate Thursday. Schatz said the machines have a useful life of roughly 10 to 11 years before road salt corrodes the bases.

“The one we took out was almost completely rotted,” he said.

His recommendation is to reduce the number of kiosks sharply, keeping perhaps one or two in service while relying on the app for the bulk of transactions.

“I’m a little bit old school myself,” Schatz said. “We could get away with maybe one kiosk downtown. It’s a lot of back-office stuff versus having the signs where you just pay through the app.”

Not everyone was ready to abandon coin-and-card kiosks entirely. Tax Collector Trish Spillman raised concern about residents who lack smartphones or credit cards; particularly those who do business at the Carbon County Courthouse.

“We’re a county seat that has a courthouse, and some of the people who come to the courthouse could be at a point in their life where they don’t have a credit card or a cellphone so it’s just difficult for them,” she said.