On Sunday, parking was free again, the two-hour spaces stop being policed at dusk, and the meters go back to the hours merchants spent five weeks begging for. Few if any of the surveyed businesses asked for free parking, he noted. “Since the new parking program has started, my business is down 40 percent to last year’s numbers,” Jacob said. The Circle’s merchants, she reminded the commission, are assessed nearly $275,000 annually for city parking. “We made a mistake, because we wanted to have consistency in enforcement hours between the paid parking and the non-paid timed parking,” she said.