In Wednesday’s Community Update about residents complaining about Downtown employees parking on their streets, you state the staff has been charged with evaluating if increased fines would help.
The answer is, it is only one part of a solution.
The real issues to evaluate are:
1 — Are the parking structures full?
2 — Is the city still leasing out parking structure space to local car dealerships?
3 — Do preferential parking districts during evening hours make sense in the residential areas impacted?
4 — Does the Downtown overlay zone still allow new uses with no parking requirements other than the structures?
Can, and should, the city offer special employee rates for structures not full?
And if they still lease space to car dealers, should the city stop the leasing and use those upper levels for employee discounted parking?
If the city still allows for no parking requirements on new uses, should that change?
And finally, as it was proven that using redevelopment funds to build the theaters was a good move, should the Redevelopment Agency consider asking the new Culver "Lot C" development to dig deeper at redevelopment expense and build an extra level of parking, so as to truly mitigate the parking problems in Downtown?
With all of these questions and possible solutions, why is staff only being asked to evaluate the cost of a parking ticket, something that will hurt employees, businesses and consumers alike, but not fix the problem?
But that's just my opinion.
