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Written By Keith Guyett

07.01.2024

Dear Investors, 

I hope everyone is having a great summer.  I am going to let you know upfront this is a really good update but she is a long one. So, relax in your favorite chair and enjoy. A ton has happened in the last several weeks. 

Austin, Texas.

We signed last week a trial to install parking meters and SafetySticks at the Texas state capital. The Texas state capital, as I hope most of you remember from 7th grade geography class, is in located in downtown Austin TX. The state of Texas operates 700 parking meters in downtown Austin around the Capital. We will be installing 10 parking meters covering 20 spaces and 5 sticks for a 30-day demo. The big drivers are 1) automated enforcement, currently all of the parking tickets are written by the Texas State Police and they have other more important things to do so they don’t really write tickets there; and 2) they loved all the security features around the meter.  If you remember this parking meter of ours does a lot more than just parking.  I will keep you posted as this trial gets going. The scheduled install is the last week of July.  I will send out an announcement once it is going, so the investors in Austin can run down and check it out. 

Parking Lots.  

We have had 29 new installations in the last several weeks. with many more coming in coming weeks including Seattle, Phoenix, Miami, Baltimore, San Antonio, Raleigh, Minneapolis, Duluth, New Orleans and more…. . Some large notable locations we’ve installed are highlighted below:

Also, new State Laws go into effect in Tennessee and Florida July 1st that requires ANY private lot or garage leveraging camera technology to have a grace period, determine time vehicles entered / exited, accurate/timely mailing of notices (within 5 days for Florida) along with other stipulations. This is big news as these requirements are key patented methods and claims which should start to drive significant business in our direction adding to our already significant install base in these states. For more information please see Tennessee Senate Bill1692 https://legiscan.com/TN/text/SB1692/2023 and Florida House Bill 271 https://www.flsenate.gov/Committees/BillSummaries/2024/html/3422

Also, last month MPS completed the integration that allows us to be the first in the Parking Industry with fixed based cameras and mailing tickets in the State of WA per “Revised Code of WA (RCW ) 46.12.630 (2)(e)”. A State Law which is an enabling act that gives permission to the WA State Department of Licensing (DOL) to a government agency, commercial parking company, or its agents the use of vehicle registration owner information to notify them of outstanding parking violations. https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.12.630

In a nutshell, Washington, Tennessee and Florida unwittingly just passed laws that make us the de facto provider for all automated enforcement in parking lots and garages in those three states because we are the only ones that have issued US patents around grace periods. Let’s go MPS!!

MicroLots Update. 

We continue to make great progress with our new MicroLots business which enables commercial property owners to monitor, enforce and monetize their small parking areas in ways previously not possible.  

In the month of May we collected more than $25k in gross (pre-split) parking and violation revenue across 6 MicroLots.  This represents an annualized run-rate of more than $300,000 of found money for property owners.  Only one of the 6 locations was previously a paid parking lot and we have been delivering a 50%+ revenue lift to that lot (notably this lot was previously managed by LAZ, one of the largest parking operators in the US).  

We will be going live on our 7th Microlot in mid-July.  For those Minnesota investors, our latest lot is the one next to Licks ice cream shop. I have personally parked in the Licks lot 500 plus times because of the 30 years I lived down that street, I had to go there to make sure my kids were getting their weekly sugar injections. Blame it on the kids, LOL.  This 30+ space lot is the busiest location in Excelsior.  Patrons of Dunn Brothers, the nail salon and Alerus Financial will be able to park for 1-2 hours free by validating their parking.  All other parkers, i.e. Licks will be required to pay.  We expect this to be a great lot for us.  Recall for MicroLots we retain a significant portion of violation revenue as well as a portion of parking revenue.  

Since introducing this business less than a year ago we have demonstrated that we can successfully penetrate this new market while generating an attractive return.  As a reminder, MicroLots are smaller parking areas (10 to 50 spaces) generally adjacent to commercial buildings that historically have not charged for parking or been able to effectively enforce their parking policies.  We are excited about this under exploited market as it more than doubles our addressable parking lot market opportunity. 

In addition to our turn-key payment and enforcement solution, we have now landed several deals where property owners have converted their free parking areas into paid lots simply by posting our scan-to-pay signage.  This allows us to address lots where It is not economically/technically feasible to install our cameras or where the property owner wants to test the waters and collect some real parking revenue/data before implementing our automated enforcement. 

Let us know if you or any of your friends own parking lots in active areas.  We’d love to talk and show how we can significantly boost their revenue/NOI with little-to-no out of pocket expense.  

SafetySticks. 

I’m happy to report that in the last couple weeks we have received signed agreements in Pennsylvania where we continue to expand our coverage.  We received a signed agreement from Lancaster, PA.  We also received a signed agreement from Hazelton, PA.   Lancaster is the 8th largest city in the state and the city is recognized as a national Vision Zero Street Safety leader.  Some of you might be wondering what the heck is Vision Zero.  Well, Vision Zero is a global movement to prevent automobile deaths and pedestrian injuries and deaths on city streets.  Protecting pedestrians is where MPS comes in because many crashes involving pedestrians happen in….. wait for it…..Places where people illegally park.  Cross walks, bus stops, bike lanes, too close to intersections.  Cities implementing Vision Zero plans view the SafetyStickas a key easy to deploy part of their strategy.  This week, we were invited to present along with our customer the City of Denver to a global audience of more than 100 Vision Zero professionals in big cities around the world.  I have included a link to the webinar here  https://vimeo.com/969207890 .  I definitely think you should watch it. Once you get done watching this you will have a complete understanding of how we position our SafetySticks and how our customer Denver feels about our SafetySticks.  This is a great thing to forward on to your friends who work at cities. We will take all the help we can get.  Some of the feedback from the Webinar included the following statements:

-I learned that there are automated methods to enforce parking restrictions, well beyond the usual overstay at a meter.
- I found the Safety Stick presentation fascinating
- The effectiveness and cost-saving potential for automated parking enforcement.
- Gaining familiarity with a new tech I didn't know existed before that seems highly effective, especially in combating the blockage of bike lanes in our city.

We have completed our installation in Manchester by the Sea and expect to be operational next week.  This is a unique installation at a beach and seaside town north of Boston that includes standard SafetyStick enforcement of illegal parking areas and timed parking in locations that are in high demand and are often abused by people who stay for 30, 60 or over 2 hours in locations meant for short-term parking. 

Further north, in the Great White North of Canada, we are live and mailing violations at the Saskatoon Airport. This is our first ever Airport enforcement installation, and we continue to see interest in enforcement not only in Saskatoon but in other airports we are talking to.  In Western Canada, at the Calgary International Airport, we have a pilot installed.   The airport recently informed us that the airport’s own foot parking patrol enforcement was only capturing 3.3% of the violations compared to the SafetySticks!  

Down south, in Rockport, TX we recently installed SafetySticks in areas identified by the police department as recurring problems.  It’s a priority for Rockport to keep certain designated areas clear.  The price of a violation in Rockport is $250 per ticket!  

 Cities are coming back to the buffet for another helping of what we cooked up. One great sign that your customers like your product and it’s working is re-orders.  In the last couple of weeks, we have received re-orders for additional SafetySticks from Bridgeport, CT, Little Falls NJ and Somerville, MA.  

Marketing. 

We have been heavily focused on three areas: Trade shows, strategic partner webinars and a heavy dose of old school direct mail and calling.

Trade shows. We continue our full court press attending key shows around the country and even our first one in Europe.  We attended 15 shows in Q2 including a number of important state police shows, the Super Bowl of the parking industry - IPMI, the biggest law enforcement show for universities - IACLEA, and we attended our first European show in Amsterdam called Inter-traffic. All of these shows continue to put us on the map as a key industry player, connect us with decision makers and most importantly create a significant number of pipeline opportunities. We have 12 more shows coming in Q3!

Strategic Partner Webinars. We explored this channel last year and quickly realized the upside.  In the last month we presented the Safety stick to the members of IPMI, Intelligent Cities Network, Parking Network, Parking Today and Vision Zero as referenced above.

Direct Mail. Many of you have seen the new SafetyStick brochure! You should have received one snail mailed to your house.  If you didn’t send an email to Rachel and she will get one out to you. If you need more once again reach out to Rachel and she can send them to you.  Her email is Rachel@mpspark.com.  Here is a link to it if you want to peak at it online, please send this link to all of your friends who work at cities. Once again, we’ll take all of the help we can get. Link is here:  High End brochure-style slideshow MPS 2024.pptx

Now we did not make this brochure exclusively for our shareholders. We are about to put on a full court press.  By the end of July, every mayor, city manager, police chief, deputy chief and city councilor in the top 1500 largest US cities will get one in the mail with a personal letter and case study.  Early results have shown it gets the phones to ring and helps move the biggest cities in the pipeline to contract!

Lawsuit. 

We filed a patent infringement lawsuit a couple weeks ago in US Federal Court against Clancy Systems.  Here is a link: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68835810/municipal-parking-services-inc-v-clancy-systems-inc/  It is about 200 pages of light reading. We have also delivered to them a cease-and-desist letter.  We offered them a carrot to take. If they are smart, they will take the carrot instead of the lawsuit. We will probably not know much for another 90 days if you have questions, please call me on this.

As you can see we are running on all cylinders right now. As always, feel free to call anytime if you have questions. 

Hold on to your HAT!!!

Joe

Keith Guyett
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