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

Sunshine Week: Council Majority Refuses To Broadcast Long-Range Financial Planning Workshop

Last week, as we mentioned in yesterday’s blog entry, the City of Davis passed a proclamation naming this week “Sunshine Week.” So it is with great irony that the council this week has chosen to have a joint meeting between the City Council and the Finance and Budget Commission without television broadcasting despite the availability of broadcasting equipment and the fact that this meeting was held at what would be a normal meeting time for the city council. Moreover this meeting which discussed the “Long-Range Financial Planning Workshop” met immediately after another workshop on the short-term Calendar which was broadcast on television.

Mayor Greenwald in both the televised and untelevised meetings complained about the lack of broadcasting for the long range planning meeting. The suggestion was that this was a decision made by City Manager Bill Emlen at the behest of the council majority of Stephen Souza, Ruth Asmundson, and Don Saylor. The council majority insisted that this meeting be held without television broadcast.

This leads to a question as to why this occurred. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, should be the value of the concept of transparency of government deliberation and government action. The full value of "Sunshine" is the ability of the public to view and scrutinize the actions of their elected officials. The topic of long-range financial planning is extremely valuable in its own right and the public should be as informed as possible about the planning, goals, and concerns of its elected officials.

This is a very important issue—long term financial planning. And yet, there were no non-staff and non-media members of the public at this meeting. As one of the members of the commission said, if your goal is long term stability and you want the public informed about it, then you need to bring light to the process.

Ironically one of the topics of conversations by both the members of the commission as well as the members of council was whether future meetings of the Finance and Budget Commission ought to be televised. This was mentioned even by members of the City Council who were part of the decision not to televise this particular meeting.

While in the end, there were no major bombshells at this meeting that ought to have necessitated either a directive to broadcast or not broadcast the meeting—that was the point. If you want public involvement in these meetings they have to be made accessible.

While public participation will likely remain an illusory goal the point is not to become an impediment to that participation but rather to facilitate it. As we saw with some of the problems facing the short-term economic workshop, the city is going to have to look long and hard about sources for revenue.

One key contributor to the budget shortfall hearkens back to the $700,000-plus revenue shortfall from fines collected from traffic and parking violations. The city has taken up huge capital upgrades in parking enforcement and traffic light enforcement. In addition they increased parking fines from $30 to $35, the expectation was that would lead to increased profit, instead it led to a huge budget shortfall as we have discussed in previous entries.

These types of decision are very concerning because they are the direct result of a number of poorly managed ideas. The unanswered question is now whether those capital improvements ended up costing the city a tremendous amount of revenue aside from the philosophical problem of relying once again upon violation of the law as a source of revenue.

This is clearly an issue that needs to be examined in both the short and long term. Frankly in the private sector, heads would roll over a $700,000 budget shortfall stemming from those types of decisions. In Davis City government it seems almost business as usual.

But it is with these sorts of discussions and decisions that the public ought to be involved in the process and the commission and council should be actively engaging the public in that discussion rather than discouraging it by refusing to televise it—for apparently no good reason.

---Doug Paul Davis reporting

Revenues Way Down from Parking Enforcement

On Tuesday, Paul Navazio, the City Finance Directory presented the Mid-Year Budget Update. One area of serious short fall is in the area of parking citations and moving violations. The current revenue is 28.6% of the budgeted figure and they have now subsequently reduced the overall revenue estimate by over $700,000 to $778,567. This figure represents only 51.5% of the original budget estimate. As one can clearly see, this represents not a small shortfall but would could only be described as a massive shortfall.

Perhaps the most alarming factor is that this shortfall comes after a massive capital investment in both cameras at intersections and also new parking enforcement vehicles equipped with GPS locators. City planners had expected that these new enforcement mechanisms would make it easier to catch violators and thus increase the revenue.

Approved in May of 2005, this system was put into place due to a number of concerns. First, efficiency, the parking enforcement officers were said to not be able to effectively monitor all regulated districts in the City. This system would be capable of scanning over 1000 license plates per hour and would therefore increase both the area covered by a single officer and the number of vehicles that can be monitored. Moreover it would eliminate the chalk marking system and therefore eliminate the problem of violators removing the chalk marks rather than moving their vehicles.

This system was authorized at $81,000 one-time fee plus a $14,000 maintenance.

The obvious sell of that system from the staff report was this was a way to catch more violators. Instead, what has happened is that the new technology combined with the stricter prohibitions against reparking have encouraged citizens to take more care when parking to avoid citations and fines. In other words, the enforcement system is so good, that it has taken away incentive for people to violate the system.

The result of this expenditure for new technology has been a drastic decline in the number of citations and thus a massive shortfall from the projected budgeted revenue.

In previous blog entries we have lamented the fact that the city relies on fines as a source of revenue.

It is probably the reparking rules more than the new GPS enforcement vehicles that has led to the fewer citations. The budget shortfall would probably be worth it if the new policies freed up parking in the core downtown area. However, that does not appear to be the case. As we have written in the past, vehicles are now simply rotating from street to street and block to block rather than occupying a single space. The net result is the lack of street parking.

There are a number of lessons here. First, technology can at times be a double-edged sword. If the city's goal was to maintain a steady revenue from parking citations, they would have been better served not trying to fix a system that was already working well. The city got a bit too greedy believing that they could create a system that would be more efficient and would catch those who would have erased the chalk rather than moving the car. What I think they did not anticipate is that those people in a chalkless system would simply move their car.

Second, the city should not be budgeting revenue from fines. That leads to a perverse incentive structure where the city relies on people violating the law and when people do not violate the law, rather than being considered a good thing, it creates a problem.

Third, you cannot finesse parking problems using enforcement means. The city should re-examine how it chooses to deal with the issue of long-term parking in the core downtown area. It should then think about how to incorporate and accommodate individuals who come to the downtown in order to do shopping or perhaps have a meal during the day.

A few weeks ago the suggestion was offered that perhaps the city needs a parking commission because the safety commission deals primarily with other issues. While it is not clear that a 20th city commission is needed, there does need to be at least a permanent subcommittee examining the issue of parking, parking enforcement, revenue, and parking allocation in both neighborhoods but also in the core downtown area.

The city in this realm seems to have been too smart for its own good. By investing in new technology the city managed to reduce its revenue flow, the irony of this situation should not be lost on its residents.

---Doug Paul Davis reporting