New parking meters installed around central Oamaru have collected an extra $20,000 from motorists in the past seven months.
The Waitaki District Council invested $440,000 to replace its 10-year-old collection of parking meters in December, and council assets engineer Gary Woock said in the past financial year expected income from parking fees was exceeded by 10%.
Income projections had risen from $180,000 to $200,000, he said.
''What that does is allow us to put that extra money back into the business rate, so we can put a portion of that back to pay for projects around town.''
He said the old machines had been prone to malfunction but the new solar-powered machines had very little downtime, which allowed more time for the town parking warden to spend on enforcement.
''They have been working really well. We can actually log in from our office and have a look at the parking meters.''
The council had 44 machines and all were working, although two had transmitted warnings - low battery and low paper.
Mr Woock said a credit-card facility was ''ready to be activated'' but would only be implemented when a facility for people to pay by text message was also ready to go into action.
Agreement was in place with Vodafone and the council was working to get a similar agreement with Telecom.
''What we want to do is to make sure everything is done together so that once it's all online we don't start introducing these things piecemeal.''
