Commentary: The Perpetual Problem of Parking in the Downtown

If there is one problem that the City Council has not adequately addressed it is the problem of parking. And really to be fair, this city council is not unique for the failure to properly deal with that problem, nor is this city unique.

However, in many ways, the solutions have not solved the problem. For instance, it is my view that the re-parking prohibitions are an unmitigated disaster. I have not seen it free up parking spots, what it does do is preclude long term parking and people from therefore doing longer term shopping or entertainment stops. That I think is the opposite of what you want to achieve.

Last year we discovered that this policy worked so well that it reduced the amount of parking tickets and therefore cut into the city's revenue.

This week we learn that the DDBA is in agreement that a solution to the parking in downtown is to meter the parking in the E Street Plaza. By itself, it is not a bad idea, I come from a city that has metered parking, but in order to provide enough of it, they had to build not one but two parking garages on both sides of the downtown and expand one of them.

The metering might provide some revenue, but I fail to see how it is going to deal with the broader problems of parking.

In isolation this problem would be somewhat of an annoyance. However, time is ticking so to speak because at some point there will be built Target out by Mace and Second Street with presumably a large amount of parking. That will take business from our downtown core. As some fear, the combination of parking problems and cheap merchandise at Target may imperil our downtown. And yet there does not seem to be a real sense of urgency among either the council or the downtown on this front.

Adding to the parking problems is the Amtrak Station that is attracting numerous out-of-town parkers who come here from the convenient and easy parking, leaving the residents of Davis high and dry.

We have a parking facility in the downtown, but in my view it is not located in the proper spot. It is on G and Fourth Street. That puts it on the east side of downtown and away from the main traffic flows and off the main track.

The parking situation calls for some more innovative solutions. We need to find a way to get parking into a central and convenient location, where it is easy for the traffic to access and easy for the pedestrians to walk to the rest of downtown.

This should not be an impossible problem. This past week, I had Matt Rexroad on the radio show, he mentioned problems with Woodland's downtown, namely that it was one long strip. Davis has a good compact downtown that should be walkable if you can find the right location to locate your parking that is.

At the end of the day, parking perhaps even more than Target or even combined with Target might be the biggest threat to the vitality of our downtown and that would be a shame because the downtown has the potential to be a really great community asset.

---Doug Paul Davis reporting

Commentary: Tearing Down our City's Character

It took me a long time to realize why the vote on Third and B Street "Visioning" Project upset me so much. After all, there has been a long string of votes, most of them these days 3-2, that have upset me from this city council led by Stephen Souza, Don Saylor, and Ruth Asmundson. In fact, the only time I can remember prevailing on a contested vote was with the Anderson Bank Building, when Stephen Souza uncharacteristically switched sides. Other than that, it has been a loss after devastating loss. But this one really hurt in a way a lot of the others have not. This one as they say, was personal and unfortunately I've felt personal before from this council. But at least the last time it felt personal, I understand fully why it felt personal. This one was more elusive.

Then as I was driving past the neighborhood, I realized what was eating at me. This was my neighborhood. For many years, I spent more time in that neighborhood than I did where I actually lived. Everyday I would walk from either Central Park or Old North down to Third Street and from there to the Social Sciences and Humanities Building. I'd walk by Ciocolat, Navin's, Roma, etc. I'd eat lunch at Rajas one of my favorite restaurants in Davis. I can see that journey in my head all the time, because I walked through it several times a day, almost everyday, for years.

And these days I talk to a lot of people and hear from a lot of people on various things in Davis. Honestly, I have not met a single person who does not have a financial stake in either the neighborhood or in the business community that supports this. I've even heard from people who do not follow Davis politics who start shaking their heads and asked a series of questions as to why the promoters would want to do this. Nobody gets this other than the council majority of Asmundson, Saylor and Souza, a few developers, and a few merchants. And I mean nobody.

This is a neighborhood that few live in, but most know and most like if not love. I think the comment made on the night of the council sticks with me most--why are we rewarding people for the failure to take care of their property? Because when you walk through the neighborhood you see some very nice old homes that have simply not been cared for. It's not the students' fault who reside in these homes. It is the fault of the absentee homeowners. And yet now they can go tear them down and rebuild and make a nice profit because the city council majority of Ruth Asmundson, Don Saylor and Stephen Souza wanted to "improve" the area.

There are lots of little things about this that bother me as well. Maria Ogrydziak is President of the DDBA and a property owner in the neighborhood. She was quoted in the Davis Enterprise as complaining that the 38 foot height restriction for her building was too restrictive.

Maria Ogrydziak said she would like to build either retail and offices or a townhouse project, depending on the zoning the council approves for her properties.

For her, the 38-foot height limit is restrictive, she said.

“With something like this, I think it’s important to be creative and when you’re so stringent about the height, you’re going to end up with that apartment building down the block from me,” she said. “It’s just like a pancake, one layer right on top of another, maxing out the height. If you want to have interesting roof lines, it completely disallows that, and it makes the parking very difficult to design underneath.”

Fortunately for Ms. Ogrydziak, her friends on the council specifically allowed her to build to 45 feet. And when some objected to the unseemliness of it, Asmundson was inclined to make all of them 45 feet in height.

How tall is 45 feet? 45 feet in comparable in height to the Chen Building. That's how we want that neighborhood to look with a bunch of 45 feet buildings. If you want to know how that might look, walk up to G and Fifth and look at the Roe Building that is under construction and decide if that's the vision that you have for Davis' residential and historical neighborhoods.

It's not my vision. I've grown tired of defending my Davis against this kind of encroachment. I've grown tired of people who want to completely remake the image and character of Davis. I believe most people in Davis would like to preserve that character. And frankly I have been tired of being accused of opposing all changes to Davis. I'm not. Give me something that I can support and I will, but this is not it. I think there are great things we can do in Davis and great changes that we can make while preserving the character of key places in Davis. But not here, and not this way. I think there are densifications even in this neighborhood I would support, but not three and four story condos, not tearing down these beautiful if falling apart bungalows.

One last point to make about the vote on Tuesday--the meeting went until 1:45 a.m. Now if you watched the meeting, you saw a series of questions from council to staff that really should not have been asked in public. I mean some of the questions asked were just baffling. And yet they went on and on for hours.

Now I point this out because Mayor Greenwald was not presiding over this meeting. Furthermore, Mayor Pro Tem Asmundson presided over this meeting. Asmundson complained a month or two ago that Mayor Greenwald did not know how to run a meeting, therefore that was the reason that the council meetings went so long. Well anyone who painfully stayed up and watched this council meeting will realize that Asmundson has no clue how to run a meeting or move it on. It was absurd. There has to be some kind of focus and some kind of structure to meetings, and this one just went on and on long past the time it should have stopped.

Unlike the meeting where Asmundson complained about Greenwald, this one was mostly on Asmundson. Because not only did she fail to take control of it, she contributed to its length by asking a series of questions that she should have asked staff in private. So should Councilmember Souza. Souza can at least be excused for asking questions that made no sense as he was suffering an allergic reaction to a wasp sting and was struggling along. Asmundson has no such excuse.

In all, it was a disappointing night and a very disappointing performance from council. The public got up and spoke and it was very clear that the council majority was paying little attention to them. They were too busy writing notes about what they were going to say in their concluding comments. If there is one thing that irritates me, it is when councilmembers have gone through a long process with the public and then they read their closing statements. Taking a note or two to remember points you want to raise is one thing, sitting and reading them is insulting to the public and it gives members of the public the impression that the elected official has no interest in public input. If you have your mind made up going in, at least fake it better.

---Doug Paul Davis reporting

Major Changes with the Davis Downtown Business Association

The Davis Downtown Business Association (DDBA) recently announced that they would no longer be accepting supplemental money from the City of Davis. What this means is that while the city would still collect the assessment fees for the DDBA from its membership, it would not supplement that money with approximately $66,000. In the meantime, the DDBA would still continue to exist but it would change its priorities and goals.

One of the major changes will be the elimination of the two fulltime positions--the executive director position held by Laura Cole-Rowe and her assistant Melissa Martinez. Those positions would be combined into one position that pay considerably less. In fact, it would pay less than the assistant position that Ms. Martinez had previously earned.

Why all of these changes? Most of this stems from the fallout from the Target election. The DDBA had taken a neutral position on Target since its membership and the board were both split. There were two board members who were strongly No on K but they never pushed the board to adopt a position. When Target passed there was considerable blame that went around in some of the merchant communities that the DDBA had not done more--despite the fact that no one really asked it to do more--certainly not the merchants who were later complaining.

As a result of the Target passage, several merchants got together and created a 14-point memo that they used to approach the board of the DDBA. One of these 14 points was not to accept city money. In response, the board created the Task Force for examining various concerns, making recommendations, and eventually helping to reorganize the entire DDBA structure.

In the meantime, several of these merchants got together and founded DIMA (Davis Independent Merchants Association). The members of DIMA would send out surveys. Some have suggested that the membership of DIMA was inflated by the leadership and that everyone who had taken a stand against Measure K had become a member of DIMA whether they were aware of it or not.

Others have complained that DIMA and this organizational effort should have taken place before the Measure K vote and had those resources been turned toward defeating Measure K, the merchants would have been in a far better and stronger position. In essence, these businesses and merchants responded too late to the Measure K threat and did not provide the No on K campaign with enough valuable resources and help until very late in the election. Had this help come earlier, the narrow victory by Measure K could have been prevented.

However, the blame here was placed on the DDBA and its reliance on city money rather than on other aspects.

One key question is whether city money influences policy? The answer to that appears to be yes. But on the other hand, the city never said anything to the DDBA about Target. Nevertheless, some of the membership did not want to accept money from a city that supports peripheral and big box development.

In any case, there was a strong move afoot to separate the DDBA from city money. If one looks around the state, most of these organizations in fact take city funding and form partnerships with the city. Davis is one of the few that did not have a big box. As several have suggested a big box is coming--for better or for worse--the next question should have been how to get money to help the downtown adapt and survive.

The Task Force would meet from January through February talking about the mission, the values, and how the downtown becomes "extraordinary." Many of the things that were highlighted by this task force, in fact the DDBA had been doing for many years. Things like downtown vision, parking, events and marketing were things that were already happening.

The process was downsized from six committees to three. Their goal was to center it down to "grassroots" and why the DDBA was formed 20 years ago--to help the merchants. Of course others have pointed out that there is a misconception that merchants are at the majority of everything, when in fact, they are only a small minority of all the businesses in the downtown.

The Task Force looked long and hard exactly at what staff was doing and began nitpicking as to what they should do. It is not clear that either the Task Force or the Board realized that the consequence from not taking city money would mean that the paid staff would be gone. However, in the end, by a series of one-vote margins, the board ended up approving policy that would lead to the elimination of their two full-time staff positions and place the policy into the hands of three committees.

At an organizational meeting last week, DDBA President Maria Ogrydziak, spoke repeatedly about making Davis an "extraordinary destination" and that they had high hopes and was sure that they can reach these incredible goals. Moreover she was certain they are really on an incredible path here.

The three committees are the committee on downtown visions and community relations, committee on marketing and events, and the committee on parking. Again these are tasks and goals that were previously achieved with the help of two full-time staffers and now placed into the jurisdiction of three committees made up of volunteers who are downtown merchants.

However, there was no talk at this meeting as to how they would transition from paid staff to volunteers. There was no talk about who would take over the day-to-day roles that previously two paid staffers had performed. The meeting was heavy on rhetoric, but very light on substance and there was no discussion whatsoever on the big issues or the daunting task faced by the board and the organization.

At a city council meeting the same night, last Tuesday, the city council would press some of the concerns that were not raised on their own. Finally they began to address concerns about how these activities would occur without staff resources. The answer they provided is that they are looking toward membership to take on some of that burden. They are going through a transition period and more of the responsibilities should be shouldered amongst the members themselves.

They were asked what if they do not take up these responsibilities? Ogrydziak's answer was that they were convinced, knowing the people involved in this, that it will succeed.

Councilmember Souza however made the crucial point that right now there is a lot of energy and enthusiasm toward this move, but over time that will wane and fewer people will be involved in such efforts.

At the core, it is difficult to believe that volunteer committees can replace the work of two full-time paid staffers. There is a reason that organizations of this sort hire paid staffers and it has everything to do with the concerns that Souza laid out.

In the end, the city may have to take up some of the slack for the events that the DDBA used to put on. One event that has already gone by the wayside at least for this year is Davisfest. That event cost $44,000. Souza and others expressed regret that this event would not continue because it had the potential to become a signature event that would draw people regionally to Davis' downtown.

The DDBA is convinced that they can still have an extraordinary downtown even with one-third of the resources and without two fulltime staffers. But color me skeptical on this point, I think they are going to miss their paid staff a lot more than they think and not just from the standpoint of putting on major events and activities but also in terms of the day-to-day ministerial tasks that were performed by staff and that made the downtown a lively and special place to be for many Davis residents and visitors.

---Doug Paul Davis reporting