City of Lewes honors parking ambassadors

Three Lewes parking ambassadors recently received awards from the city for their service to the community.

Buddy Hall-McBride, a second-year ambassador, was honored with the Resilience & Innovation Champion Award. Sue Hennessey, a second-year ambassador, received the Outstanding Team Player Award. Kenneth Pileggi, a first-year ambassador, received the Pride of Lewes Award. 

This season, the city rebranded its parking enforcement employees as ambassadors to better reflect their mission to help visitors. The city has four full-time and four part-time parking ambassadors.

The ambassadors said people generally treat them the same as they did under their previous name.

“People are nice — the only time they’re not is when we give them a ticket, and then they blame us,” Hall-McBride said.

Dennis Crawford, parking ambassador supervisor, said one of the ambassadors’ roles this season is to educate customers about the city’s new text-to-pay service. He said it is easier to use than the machines or the Parkmobile app.

“We started putting stickers on the machines on July 8, and by the end of the day, people were already using it,” Crawford said.

Crawford said they had done about 700 text-to-pay transactions as of Aug. 12. He said texting works even with limited Wi-Fi at the beach.

Crawford said he thinks the machines will be obsolete in a few years, and all parking transactions will be done by phone.