The International Parking & Mobility Institute’s Professional Recognition Awards are the industry’s people award — separate from the Awards of Excellence, which recognize projects and design work through the Apex program. The distinction is worth keeping straight, because the two run in the same season and get conflated constantly. The Professional Recognition Awards go to individuals and organizations, nominated by peers and selected by a judging committee. In 2026 the top honor went to Park Omaha.

The Four Categories

The program is organized into four award categories, one of which subdivides.

Organization of the Year recognizes a single organization demonstrating exceptional leadership, innovation, and impact. The stated criteria are a culture of excellence, high-impact application of technology, and years of demonstrated leadership — that last element is what separates it from a single-project award.

Industry Professional of the Year recognizes an individual across the full span of their contribution. The 2026 recipient was Adam Kriegel, PTMP, Vice President of Business Development and Partnerships at Passport Labs.

Emerging Leader of the Year recognizes early-career professionals. Two were named in 2026: Madison Huemmer, Vice President of Revenue at Throne Labs, and Brooke Krieger, MPA, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Passport Labs.

Professional Excellence is the category that subdivides, running four tracks that map to the functional shape of a parking organization:

  • Leadership — Austin Britt, MURP, Parking and Micromobility Planning Coordinator, City of Tampa, and Fed Revolte, Director of Parking and Curb Management Services, City of Tampa
  • Technology — Amelia A. Capone, Director of Curbside Management, City of Boston
  • Operations — Syreeta Cox, PECP, Compliance Enforcement and Events Manager, University of South Carolina
  • Customer Service — Darla Guerra, Manager, Customer Service, Texas A&M University

Two things stand out in that list. The first is Tampa taking both Leadership recipients — a signal about a single municipal department rather than a single person. The second is that the Operations recipient holds a PECP credential, which is the enforcement-track certification. An awards program that puts an enforcement compliance manager in the same tier as a curbside director is making a point about where the operational center of gravity in this industry actually sits.

Why Park Omaha

The judges’ comment on the Organization of the Year award was that “the Park Omaha program stands out as both a forward-thinking parking and mobility program and an industry spokesperson with how they share their innovative story.”

The second half of that sentence is the part most award coverage skips. Park Omaha was not recognized solely for operating well. It was recognized for operating well and communicating about it — which, in a category whose criteria include years of demonstrated leadership and industry impact, is a substantive rather than decorative distinction.

The operational numbers behind the citation are specific. Park Omaha, the parking and mobility division of the City of Omaha’s Public Works Department, oversees:

  • Nine garages and three surface lots, totaling 13,171 spaces
  • 1,000 scooters and 420 e-bikes across 83 stations
  • 118,639 new parkers in 2024
  • 1.55 million transactions in 2024, described as a historic high for the division

Read those figures together and the shape of the program becomes clear. This is a mid-size municipal operation that has absorbed shared micromobility into the same division that runs the garages, rather than parking it in a separate transportation office or leaving it entirely to private operators. Eighty-three stations for a fleet of 1,420 devices is a dense, managed deployment, not a permissive dockless permit.

The 118,639 new parkers figure is the one worth dwelling on. New parkers — not total parkers, not transactions — is a customer-acquisition metric, and it is unusual to see a public parking division report one. It implies the division is tracking first-time users as a distinct population and treating growth in that population as a program objective. That is a private-operator habit applied inside a public works department, and it is consistent with the judges’ framing of Park Omaha as a program that knows how to tell its own story.

What the Award Pattern Says About the Field

Across the full 2026 slate, the recipients cluster in three places: municipal curb and mobility management (Tampa, Boston, Omaha), university operations (South Carolina, Texas A&M), and mobility technology vendors (Passport, Throne Labs). Two of the four individual recipients from the vendor side sit in business development and partnerships roles rather than product or engineering — a reflection of how much of this industry’s technology adoption currently runs through relationship-managed channels rather than procurement catalogs.

The absence worth noting is the commercial operator category. Large private parking operators are thinly represented in the 2026 individual awards relative to their share of managed spaces. Whether that reflects nomination behavior — these are peer-nominated awards, and public-sector and university professionals participate heavily in IPMI’s volunteer structure — or something about where visible innovation is happening is a fair question, and the answer is probably some of both.

For Organizations Considering a Nomination

Two practical observations. First, the criteria reward duration. “Years of demonstrated leadership” is in the Organization of the Year language explicitly, which means a strong single year is not the profile that wins. Second, the Park Omaha citation suggests that documented, quantified self-reporting is part of what gets recognized — the division had transaction counts, new-parker counts, space counts, and micromobility fleet counts ready to present. Operations that cannot produce those figures on request are not disadvantaged by the judging so much as by their own data practice.

The award slate is, in that sense, a reasonable reading list for anyone benchmarking a parking organization: four categories, a clear set of criteria, and a winner whose numbers are public.