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HomeMy WebLinkAboutParking Advisory Board - Minutes - 10/10/2016MINUTES of the CITY OF FORT COLLINS PARKING ADVISORY BOARD October 10, 2016 5:30 p.m. 215 North Mason – Community Room Fort Collins, CO 80524 FOR REFERENCE: Chair: Susan Kirkpatrick Vice Chair: Holly Wright Staff Liaison: Kurt Ravenschlag 221-6386 Administrative Support: Melissa Brooks 224-6161 BOARD MEMBERS PRESENT: CITY STAFF PRESENT: Susan Kirkpatrick, Chair Kurt Ravenschlag, Transfort/Parking General Manager Steve Schroyer Katlyn DeMallie, Transfort Administrative Clerk Nora Hill Bob Criswell Carey Hewitt George Newman ABSENT: OTHERS IN ATTENDANCE Holly Wright, Vice Chair Craig Dubin, Transfort Communications & Admin Manager Stephanie Napoleon Seth Lorson, Comm. Development and Neighborhood Svcs Michael Short Councilmember Kristen Stephens 1. CALL TO ORDER Chair Kirkpatrick called the meeting to order at 5:30pm. 2. WELCOME AND INTRODUCTIONS 3. AGENDA REVIEW No changes. 4. APPROVAL OF MINUTES Hewitt moves to accept August meeting minutes and Newman seconds. DRAFT Meeting Minutes October 10, 2016 Page | 2 Discussion: 5. COUNCIL LIAISON REPORT None 6. PUBLIC COMMENT None 7. DISCUSSION ITEMS A. Downtown Plan: Parking Related Policies Ravenshlag: As Seth is getting ready I’d like to make an announcement as well. Starting last week Monday, Seth has joined the Transfort and Parking team. Right now he will be serving as a transit and parking planner for us. He will probably be focusing a lot on the parking side because that is where we have the greatest deficiency now in terms of longer range planning. We are excited to have him join our team. Lorson: Today I thought I would bring to you, before we even bring that draft plan to the public, the parking policies in the down town plan. They are a little more expansive than the on street paid parking specific things that we have been discussing over the last year. Just as a reminder of what we have done so far, we went to City Council in May and the feedback that we got from council is that they were not in support of moving forward with an on street paid parking program or a pilot program for on street paid parking. They were supportive of data collection and procuring data collection technology, so we could get some better information of what’s happening. They were supportive of the creation of a transportation demand management program and some adjustment to the enforcement that could help give us some interim relief. We already really have our principles and policies in action; the real meat of the plan is there. However, there’s a lot more to a plan that just the policies, there’s a lot of graphical information and bits of information that help the policies become more understandable and a lot richer. We are working on that right now and will have a copy out for public review come November/December. We will give you opportunities to review that. We are still looking at what the review opportunities will look like because it will be about a 100 page document. But we will make sure to get a draft sent to the Parking Advisory Board. We are on City Council’s calendar on Jan 17 th for adoption of the Downtown Plan. As a reminder for you, since we have been so focused in on the paid parking conversation the Downtown Plan, we have six broader topic areas. Parking is actually couched within the transportation and parking topic area. Within the transportation/parking topic area there are three general principals; one of them is related to parking. Did everyone get the principles and policies before the meeting? Everyone got a chance to review those? Generally we have principal, policy, and action item. That is the structure of policies for our downtown plan. That is consistent with the way the City plan is laid out, where you have a much broader concept in a principle, it gets whittled down to a policy and you have direct action items after that. Our transportation and parking principle 2 is to manage on street and structured parking facilities for all users including primary employment, ground floor retail, business services and visitors, that adequately balances supply and demand and provides parking infrastructure to support future growth. Very general, saying that we want to create a good comprehensive plan for our parking and transportation. We are going to go through all the policies, I want to keep it open and loose, if you have feedback or questions as we go along please interrupt me. DRAFT Meeting Minutes October 10, 2016 Page | 3 The first couple of parking policies are here, the first one is about bicycle parking. It is to provide adequate bicycle parking and management of facilities. The second parking policy is the implementation a data collecting system. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about this one already. You’ll notice in the action item document that I sent you, it really digs down. Develop a technology specification, research vendors, and all the details that Craig actually does to figure out how we are going to actually implement a data collection technology. Kirkpatrick: Do you have a section that addresses what success looks like? Lorson: Yes we are working on that, it is our intention. Kirkpatrick: Okay that is your intention. Also, what is the time frame, because that affects our work plan. What sort of time frame are we looking at? Lorson: We do have an action item spreadsheet with all of our action items, who is responsible, and the time frame. I think there are four areas of time frame, and I’m sorry I do not have them here. This is definitely part of the bigger document. A lot of the things we have talked about are going to happen right away. We are already working on some of them. Yes, there will be more information as the full document gets out there. Criswell: How do you measure demand on parking spaces? Lorson: Typically we measure with occupancy. If you have full occupancy, then there is a high demand. You could get it down to a finer grain which I think you would have to work with traffic services to measure. We would need to understand how many people look for parking and drive through. Are we at 100% occupancy and people are being turned away? Criswell: If you were at 80% occupancy would you consider that medium demand or low demand? Lorson: What we have learned is that 85% is your optimal occupancy. Where there is still availably, but it is still very parked up because there is a vibrancy happening and people patronizing the businesses. The 15% availability represents the people coming and going and still being able to find at least one parking space per block face. That’s kind of the sweet spot that we have been told you should aim for. Criswell: Is there a factor for convenience included in that? Lorson: The concept is, is that if there is at least one parking space per block face, then you will be able to find a parking spot in a convenient location. Criswell: In a three block area, if two of the blocks are completely full and the third has three spaces, does that count as one space per block? Ravenschlag: We measure it by block face in the downtown area, so we are looking at the 15% availability per block face in downtown. We wouldn’t look at it as an aggregate where there may be 15% availability in downtown, but it’s in the southwest portion of down town and everywhere else is 100% occupied. DRAFT Meeting Minutes October 10, 2016 Page | 4 Criswell: I continue to notice that the parking garages are underutilized. So if you are going to count those spaces as part of the 15% we are always going to have 15% available. I know we have to do something to get more parking spaces, but I would like us to figure out someway where we can use the spaces that we have now more efficiently, and that’s why my question was about how we measure. As far as I’m concerned I’d like a space right in from of my front door open at all times, but of course that’s not going to happen. Ravenschlag: We are certainly factoring in the availability in the garages. Criswell: How do you do that? Do you count that as .5 of a spot? Is there a quantitative measurement? Lorson: Yes, you’ve seen this diagram. This really correlates with a spreadsheet of counting block spaces. This is the way that we measure occupancy thus demand in parking in downtown. This is a diagram we have in the parking plan; there are a dozen of these for different times of the day and different days of the week. Criswell: I understand it is an almost impossible question, but it does need to be addressed. Lorson: So, how to more efficiently use the spaces we have, that’s the question? Criswell: We have an optimum number of having 15% vacancy down town, is that correct? I think we have 15% vacancy don’t we, if we measure all the parking spaces available against the spaces that are vacant throughout down town. But a casual observer would not say that. To me parking and how it relates to my business is a matter of how people feel about it than the reality. Ravenschlag: What we are seeing and what you are saying is that there is availability in the structures, even though the on street looks like it has much higher occupancy. I think that speaks to the issue of us trying to get people off the street and into the garages to where we can get them more appropriately parked based on the duration of their stay. I know we’ve talked about employees, and how do we get employees off the street and into the structures. I think trying to accommodate that shift will address the issue that you are speaking to. Lorson: That’s been essential to the conversation that we’ve been having over the last year, is how do we get people to park in the most appropriate location based on how long they are going to stay. That’s why we’ve come up with some of the policies that we actually have here. That’s one of the reasons we were looking at on street paid parking, assuming that it would manage parking in a way that would be less expensive to go to the parking garages where there is availability for longer periods of time and the on street parking would be more expensive because that is the most convenient and easy parking to find. As the parking plan said, the pricing system is upside down where your most convenient parking on street is free and then it costs you money to go to the least convenient parking in the garage. We’ve been struggling with this for quite a while now, we think some of the policies that we have here will help us begin to address how do we more efficiently use the spaces that we have. Hewitt: In the civic center we have around 900 spaces, is it a third public, a third county, a third City? How does that work? I know the funding was a third, third, third. DRAFT Meeting Minutes October 10, 2016 Page | 5 Ravenschlag: We reserve a certain amount of permits for each entity, and if the entity is not using the full allotment of permits, we ask if we can then give then give them to another entity to facilitate them. I’m not sure of the split off of the top of my head, but that is how we distribute the permits. Hewitt: Looking at those statistics it looks like about 50% of the spots in the structures are filled during the day, although I know you’ve oversubscribed permits because statistically you’d do that. Can you subscribe more? Ravenschlag: Those are conversations we are having right now. We are about to do a pilot on a surface lot over at the DMA, we are not necessarily going to put a limit on the number of permits sold. But then we have to effectively communicate that the purchase of this permit does not guarantee you a space, it allows you the opportunity to look for a space, you could say a permit to hunt. That could be a philosophy that we try in other areas where we sell permits, other on street or structured facilities, where we are not setting an arbitrary limit. One of the concerns is the perception issue, people are being denied the purchase of the permit because we say we are full, but you go into the garage and see plenty of availability. That’s an area that we are certainly going to be looking into. We are going to try it out here very soon with the DMA surface lot because we lost half of that lot and instead of reducing the number of permit holders, we are going to keep the same number of holders with half the amount of available parking and communicate to them that they may not get space, but they are still allowed the opportunity to look for a space. Hewitt: That might work, I have a permit there and I usually find spaces. So are you going to issue an unlimited number of permits there? Ravenschlag: We are going to try it out right now with not reducing the number of permit holders, and see how that works. You look at the University and it causes a lot of angst, because they don’t set a limit for parking permits. They will sell as many permits as people are willing to buy, regardless of the number of parking spaces they have. That could be a model that we look into. Kirkpatrick: They’ve been doing that for years. This parking utilization data, we currently don’t have very robust information. So we don’t know, aside from those points of times in 2014 and 2015, we don’t really know what utilization looks like. Or whether or not it’s changing, staying static or dynamic. So this would change us into more dynamic? Lorson: Absolutely, because this will tell us in real time, this will be much more dynamic. We also hope it will have information for the public. Hewitt: If you double the permits in the parking garages and cut the price in half to make it more acceptable, what do you think that would do? Ravenschlag: It could possibly increase utilization of the structure, for sure. Hewitt: And I don’t necessarily mean you have to cut the price in half, but you could reduce it. I think we could sell it that way. Hill: Except the street parking is still free, you can’t get lower than that. DRAFT Meeting Minutes October 10, 2016 Page | 6 Criswell: Not discounting what Seth said about the upside down model, the most convenient spots are free. But the most convenient spots are free IF you can find one, but if you have to drive around the block three or four times I think some of the convenience factor is dissipating. I personally like the garages; I find that they are set at a very reasonable price. I think you’re onto something if they were half the price, two quick nickels is better than one slow dime. I was going to mention at some point tonight, my permit is only good at the Remington street lot, and there are times where I barely get a spot. I think it would be desirable to a lot of people, if you can’t get a spot on Remingtion you can go to the Civic Center. Hewitt: It might be different prices. I know the Olive Street lot is like $5.50 a month, it’s very reasonable. But it’s the outlying parking lot. Kirkpatrick: So this new direction will give us real data instead of just speculating endlessly about the possibilities and we could see what the affect was from change in policy or price. We’ve never had anything like that. Criswell: Back to my original question of how you measure demand. What I’m concerned with is the people that stay home and don’t go downtown because they don’t want to deal with parking, and I think that should be factored in. I don’t know how you would measure it. Kirkpatrick: There’s a statistical technique called the quasar of distribution. You can probably do that kind of thing for estimating the amount of people that are not coming, but the main part of this exercise is to figure out how the current on street and structured parking fit within the principles. The downtown plan isn’t structure for people who are not coming. Lorson: We have tried to reach out, and we have heard anecdotally that people won’t come down because of parking. So I can image that the measure you are talking about would correlate with occupancy at any given time. So, policy C-Parking enforcement adjustments, we are already talking about this. This is the idea that people show up at 4:05pm and park all night long because of this witching hour at 6:00pm where we stop enforcing. You don’t get the turn over that is desired for the evening market or weekend market. What we are looking at is possibly extending into the evenings our two hour enforcement, as well as looking at the mitigation of what we call gaming the system, where people move their cars from block face to block face every two hours. We think employees are your primary culprit. So this concept is that instead of enforcing two hours for block face, we would do a district or zone where you could park for two hours and then you would have to leave that zone. We are still exploring the details of such an idea. Parking demand reduction: research creative options that reduce parking demand, educate the parking public about alternatives. We do have a budget offer right now for this, transportation planning does. Ravenschlag: I will just note that when we evaluated parking enforcement adjustments, that the two hours zone, was not a very popular idea due to the confusion. Lorson: I couldn’t find anyone else doing this when I was doing research. Ravenschlag: The PAB was not in favor of it. That may be one to review then. DRAFT Meeting Minutes October 10, 2016 Page | 7 Lorson: If we are not in favor of exploring that then we can remove it from our policies. Kirkpatrick: If you had other sources of support for that, but be aware that the board did not support that idea. Hewitt: Back to this concept of permit to “hunt” or park. So you have for example the Remington lot or the Old Town lot, say you have 300 spaces. The building next door that they are planning to build bought some permits as I understand so that they can satisfy their parking requirement for the building. So if you have these unlimited parking permits, how does that play into the requirements for parking for a new structure? Lorson: Let’s skip ahead for that question. Public parking management-create policies that dictate off site and parking structure leasing for new development in lieu of providing onsite parking. In a former time, the conversation was, “do you want two hour in front of your business”, “sure yes”, shake hands and then it was done. There was no policy around that. We are looking at creating more robust policies. This first portion of the section is what you are talking about. I don’t think we can resolve that here and now. I think it’s going to take a lot of thinking and data of how much we are currently overselling. And the point that you made about 221 E Mountain Ave, they bought 56 permits in the garage next door. That makes sense for that development, but that is a structure that serves that entire side of downtown. Is it appropriate to allow them to buy that many off site spaces to satisfy their parking requirement? These are things that we have to look at a little bit further in depth. That is why we have this as a policy right now because we will be doing further research on this. Kirkpatrick: So can I ask Steve, the fact that the City doesn’t have these kinds of policies, has this been a frustration for you? Schroyer: Well there have been a lot of frustrations. I see that we have been at this for how long, three years? Whenever I see the Council didn’t support what was brought to them it frustrates me. The City spent a lot of time and money researching things and now we have to have more research done. What’s messing everything up is we have Max, we have the new hotel, we have an influx of people coming, we have new office buildings coming, there is still this perfect storm that we had three years ago and nothing has been done. I think finally these guys are going to be armed with money with their offering to Council to go and track data and bring back a plan. Someone can finally say based on this data, we finally need to do something. Am I frustrated yes, but I think something is coming. Kirkpatrick: I was wondering specifically about policy I, without policy each employer is going in to work with the City on its own. So there is no predictable way for an employer to approach the City about expectations regarding their on street or off street parking. Schroyer: What just recently changed was a year ago, whenever Council adopted parking requirements for office buildings. Up until then it wasn’t a big issue, like we built our building across from the Lincoln Center and we technically under the new code would need to provide 47 spaces. We did not need to do that because we got in before the code. That’s the issue with the new buildings because they have to buy spaces and there is no parking for any new buildings, especially on the Meldrum Corridor. Especially with residential parking DRAFT Meeting Minutes October 10, 2016 Page | 8 and now the RP3 went in there, it’s a complete disaster. If you go back a slide, the policy that I’m happier with is the parking in lieu of fee. We could give the City $50k for our building and they could start building structures. Lorson: Now this one actually came out of the urban design team. They mocked up some hypothetical developments. We want relatively dense product (3-4 stories), zero lot lines, and they did a pro-forma analysis, how much it would cost to make it and how much they will get out of it. They found that the thing that was actually breaking the bank is parking. Parking is very, very expensive, as we know it’s between $35-40,000 a parking space in a structure. Even more so if you have to go underground. Some of these buildings have really small footprints and can’t fit the amount of parking they need at all. We realize that this is a good idea, however you read that within this policy it is not a good idea until we have a larger war chest if you will. We need to have a better strategy to implement or develop new parking. Because $50,000 for someone who needed 20 parking spaces? That’s really only the cost of one spot in a parking structure. It really doesn’t do it. Once we have something in the ground that makes sense because you can put it in the war chest and buy permits, and we actually have the availability to do that. That’s why this reads like this, “when a sustainable funding source for creating new parking supply is created”. We are still working towards that. Schroyer: So if you need 50 spaces, you pay for it at $30,000 a space. That is what kills projects. Lorson: While we are here, let’s go up to G. Develop additional parking structures. People told us time and time again in the downtown plan process we need more parking structures. If you follow up and look at the action items for parking structures, it says identifying conditions that warrant development of new structures and consideration should include land use, traffic patterns, transportation options, and turnover data. These are things we are actually looking at right now. Explore various funding sources for developing parking structures, such as public/private partnerships, parking fee in lieu, on street paid parking, etc. We want to leave options open, but those are the things that actually need to happen before we can get a fee in lieu. If we don’t have enough money to build a structure, what you are doing is just creating more demand and not being able to create new supply for that, even though that it was the intent is. Kirkpatrick: You could use parking in lieu to buy parking in existing service lots that are privately owned. Lorson: That is different. What you are talking about is an offsite parking requirement where you are satisfying your parking requirement by actually buying parking spaces off site. A parking fee in lieu is buying into a system. We don’t actually have that system in place right now. Kirkpatrick: It doesn’t always have to only go into a structure does it? Ravenschlag: I think what she is saying is, say under Steve’s example: $50k was provided, say there is phased location for future parking. It may start out as a surface lot, that fee in lieu could go towards that surface lot perhaps before we structure it. DRAFT Meeting Minutes October 10, 2016 Page | 9 Kirkpatrick: You don’t have to build the structure first before you can start collecting for it. Lorson: Oh yes I see, that is correct. Ravenschlag: The fee in lieu could also go towards debt services as well. Kirkpatrick: Yes, I know there is a big interest in taking on debt for parking structures. If it is in the parking policies, or in the down town plan, to take on debt…is it in there? Lorson: No. It doesn’t specifically call out the funding mechanism that would be used for that. But that’s what the action items on the parking structure policy does say, to explore options for that. Ravenschlag: That’s how civic center was financed as well as the new structure. We are shifting our debt finance on the Civic Center in 2018 for the new structure. So there is a precedent for that. Criswell: The parking fee in lieu- if a person wants to build a building that is 50,000 square feet for example, he pays a fee based on that square footage into a system towards either return debt on existing parking or building additional parking. Is that correct? Lorson: Yes, generally that is it. Criswell: Does that business pay anything after that to go towards maintenance of the structures? Lorson: Typically not. It’s a onetime fee. Criswell: Well that’s a great deal for them. Schroyer: The problem is, say we build a structure for 200 cars and we put 200 people in the garage. We just freed up 200 spots on the street, that doesn’t seem very fair. Use Otter Box for example, let’s say we build a 50k square foot office building attached to a three story parking garage with 250 spaces, we just took 250 cars off the street and put them into a parking structure. But we spent 7.5 million dollars to build this. How is that fair? Nobody said years ago build buildings without building parking. You can’t blame it on that. We have the post office that doesn’t have enough parking, the county building, First national Bank. There are all of these people that are being assisted with free parking, this is not rocket science. This is why the public/private partnership, like what we saw with the hotel for instance, is very important. I think you are going to see more of those things coming in the future. Kirkpatrick: So, we skipped over E and F. Lorson: We sure did. So E is to engage in public private partnerships. This one has been called out very specifically; we heard it from our market and economy group. Everyone likes these ideas, just like Steve was saying. And then on street paid parking, we know the City council said they didn’t want to do on street paid parking yet. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have it in a policy for the future. It reads, implement on street paid parking program that further manages parking demand and generates revenue to invest in parking structures. This leaves a DRAFT Meeting Minutes October 10, 2016 Page | 10 lot of questions out there, following up with that we will work with the PAB to identify the thresholds that we want to set, the threshold you typically hear is 85%. We will understand this information better when we get our data collection technology in place. One more action item on here that I want to highlight is to identify a specific use of revenue generated from on street paid parking that supports City policy. If we ever move forward with an on street paid parking plan, it’s going to be much more complex than what you see in the down town plan in terms of how we use that revenue. This is left open to continue the dialog as we continue to talk about on street paid parking. Kirkpatrick: Last month, Craig brought us this idea about the pay to extend, which is not obvious. I thought maybe it was in an earlier section about the enforcement adjustments. Lorson: No you are right, it’s not in there. It is explicitly in the Parking Plan, but not in this document. Kirkpatrick: That action item seemed to be more accepted than talking about meters or kiosks. It seems like an interim step that might be better than the pilot program for us. It just was kind of an opportunity. Lorson: I wonder if we couldn’t just switch that out in the parking enforcement adjustments. And say allow for the ability to extend by two hours from a pay by cell system. And maybe note that it is consistent with the adopted parking plan. Kirkpatrick: Or put it into the on street paid parking, because as Craig said it was kind of like the nose under the camel’s tent. As an action item, it is on street paid parking it just doesn’t use lollipop meters or banks of kiosks. It’s less money. Ravenschlag: It doesn’t change the existing conditions. It’s not changing how parking currently functions today. It’s just adding. Kirkpatrick: But there’s a paid element that will keep people from staying longer. Criswell: Where were you going to put this? Lorson: I think either one would work; we could put it on street paid parking or somewhere else. Criswell: Me being the anti, to my last breath, of on street parking. I want to see where you put it simply because I think with all of the studies that staff has made saying on street parking is inevitable and it generates money…I don’t want to commit to any on street aid parking until the last possible moment. If the parking structures were full, I could see having to go to on street paid parking. What I like about this plan, as long as it’s not in the paid parking section, is it allows you to see if there really is a demand for people who really do want to stay longer and are willing to pay. At some point you could graduate the fees, to where “okay, hey I’m down town my meeting went a little long, it’s worth a buck or two to stay”. You can adjust it where the first hour is 2 dollar, the second is 5, the third is 10, etc. At some point they will just go park in the garage. I can see this as being a valuable tool to see where we stand on paid parking. I think it will show to us the demand for extended parking in down town. Lorson: I’m also curious because I would speculate that it would reduce turnover, because it DRAFT Meeting Minutes October 10, 2016 Page | 11 would allow people to stay longer if we price it very low. When we have this technology to be able to monitor, then we will know too what the effects are. If right now the parking structure is one hour free and a dollar for subsequent hours and on street is two hours free, it all about pricing. Hewitt: The pricing is key. Kirkpatrick: But at least this would give some possibility of a better comparison. Lorson: And flexibility, give the patrons an opportunity to not have to leave if they want to eat dinner, go buy ice cream, and shop. Hill: Everybody who is against paid parking is under the assumption that no one ever wants to park more than two hours down town and I think that that is not true at all. Hewitt: I think it’s a psychological perception. The idea that you could extend your time downtown so you can shop, eat, and have desert and stay 3 hours, but you are paying an extra dollar for each hour. Pretty soon you realize the garage is a better deal. It’s a gradual education and this system could be part of that education. It’s just hard because I’m afraid it’s a deterrent for people coming down town as a psychological thing. Kirkpatrick: And what I love about it is that we won’t invest as a community to buy those big box kiosks, but we can just go straight to an app that can be used for on street paid parking if the community decides to go that way. We are already utilizing the way it’s going to be done in the future, as opposed to investing in ugly boxes. We are just bypassing a step. Lorson: I am happy to add that into the action items under one of those policies. I will confer with staff. Corey: I remember going to St. Petersburg, Florida, and they had this option. It was so frustrating; I just went off to a parking garage to find a space because it was so hard to communicate what you had to do to park downtown as a visitor. Criswell: What I like about the cell phone idea, is that the people who have been downtown and had a nice meal, and want to go shopping and are willing to pay a couple of dollars, they have that option. I don’t think they are our first target to get into the structure, I think our first target is to get the employees into the structure. I think the pricing structure should gradually get higher if you are extending your on street parking. My neighbor lets his employees go two by two to switch their cars so they don’t get tickets. He is paying them their salary to run their cars around. For $18 he could just buy them a parking space on the roof. Schroyer: You just contradicted yourself. You said a minute ago that you don’t want to do on street parking, but now you are okay with them paying to extend their on street parking. You want to force them to go to the garage by making it paid-on street parking. Criswell: Well I still want to the two hours free, I’m talking about paying to extend. Schroyer: Yes, I get that, but it’s still on street paid parking. Why do two hours free? Make it one hour free. DRAFT Meeting Minutes October 10, 2016 Page | 12 Criswell: Carey’s right it’s all perception. Hewitt: So this gradual presentation, this camel under the tent, is part of that process. I can see that. Kirkpatrick: So we have two policies left, correct? Lorson: Okay, we already talked about the parking management. On this last one we are going to talk about implementing safety measures to ensure on street and structure parking are safe at all times for all users. We would do an audit of our spaces. We want to make them well lit, and maybe getting an escort to walk to the parking structure at night. Newman: I’m going to raise an issue that I don’t think we’ve ever touched. How do you justify those middle spaces on college in terms of safety? Lorson: I’d be curious to know what the actual accident incident is there. I don’t think it’s too high, everyone does go so slowly. There have been a lot of conversations about those spots. Newman: I avoid them like the plague because it forces you to jaywalk. To me it’s not safe. Group Conversation: Never seen an accident due to those middle spots. Hewitt: When the City was built they had the streets built wide enough so you could turn a wagon around without having to back it up. Every block has a traffic light so you can cross when the light turns red. Kirkpatrick: Thank you, Seth. Did you have more? Lorson: That was all that I had for parking policies down town. Kirkpatrick: You’ll see that when Kurt and Melissa sent us out the agenda, I was wondering if at the end of Kurt’s presentation we would want to have some sort of communication about support for these plans, but I think we need to see these plans in more of a formal form. I’d like to see the actual draft document. Lorson: I can of course come back; presenting the actual document isn’t going to be really feasible, but we can get it to you for review and comment. We are going to do lots of different events where people can come and ask questions. Kirkpatrick: We are going to be working on our 2017 work plan which is why I was asking about timing, what things are going to be queued up? We have some idea from what you just said, but the one big City activity is the City Plan update. Is there a parking element in the City Plan update? Lorson: Not that I know specifically, but it’s going to be the comprehensive plan for the City, the transportation master plan, and the Transfort operating plan all at the same time. It’s going to be one of the biggest planning efforts the City has ever seen. DRAFT Meeting Minutes October 10, 2016 Page | 13 Kirkpatrick: And that is next year? Ravenschlag: If council approves that recommendation. Right now it looks like it will be approved. It will be a huge multidepartment project. We had tried to add a comprehensive parking plan to that, it was the one that got cut out. But we’ll be working to insert parking into really all three of those plans. And working with the project team, I’ve already been having those conversations. Parking is having such a huge influence on all three of those areas, that we really wouldn’t have a complete plan without it. B. Review 2016 Work Plan Kirkpatrick: With the exception of the education and outreach item, we pretty much completed our work plan. Shocking. It’s good! It was so influenced by the fact that we were in the vortex of the downtown plan. I’m wondering if in 2017 we will have a similar vortex for some of these other community wide plans, and if that should be the focus in our 2017 plan. Maybe we will move off of downtown and sort of focus more comprehensively through the City. It will be so much more interesting than going round and round with down town. Ravenschlag: I’m really excited to have Seth on our team now because he will be able to help facilitate these conversations for us. We had a scoping meeting last week and parking was really coming up in all three areas of the planning. How are we integrating parking into our overall transportation network and a plan for that? On the transit side, it plays into the same conversation of how we are envisioning the relationship between transit and parking to serve our various activity centers in the community. On the City side, that is what we are hearing from the development community, what you are saying, one of the biggest barriers to facilitating development and what’s called for in our plans in terms of land use. Parking is inevitably a big part of the conversation across all three plans. We will have two planners from Transfort and parking engaging in that effort. We will be able to leverage the entire project team to support this board throughout the course of that project. C. Ideas for 2017 Work Plan Kirkpatrick: So do other people have other ideas for 2017? Newman: Addressing parking for Max. Kirkpatrick: And I believe that’s part of what we were just discussing. Other work plan items? Hewitt: It’s such a moving target because we’ve added Max and another garage and more people down town. Just like a teenager, you figure out a 12 year old and they turn 13. Kirkpatrick: Holly recommended that we as a board provide input to the Council on new development and its impact on parking. She also suggested having input on the parking management strategies that we suggested and reporting on that. She also suggested evaluating the RP3 program again to see if it is meeting neighborhood needs. Ravenschlag: I would echo what Holly said in terms of feedback that would be useful for us. DRAFT Meeting Minutes October 10, 2016 Page | 14 RP3 is probably the most controversial element of the program of services that parking provides. I think feedback on that would be really helpful for us. I know each neighborhood we go into we come across new issues and different perspectives. One of the questions we are getting right now is, is there an end to RP3? We’ve extended as far north as Old Town west. As the ordinance is written there isn’t necessarily an end as long as residential parking demand meets certain thresholds that we have established. Those are things that I know we would like input on as we move forward into the new year. You are all welcome to comment on stadium/game day parking management if there is interest in that. I know that will be a hot topic for us in 2017. The two hour extension that we were talking about with the technology, that is something that we appreciate feedback on. We have a lot of technology on our horizon in terms of data collection for the space counters, using pay stations and mobile apps to pay for time, those are all things that will be coming on line in 2017 that we would want feedback on from you all. Hewitt: Is 2017 also the year that the other two garages will be converted? Or is that just down the road at some point? Ravenschlag: Right now in our budget offer, we proposed doing one per year, 2017 and 2018. Hewitt: That’s a real interesting concept, issuing more permits at a lower price to see if more people would be there. The City employees only pay $13 per month to park in the garage? And yet, they still don’t. Ravenschlag: Quite a few do park in the garage, but we would like more. Schroyer: Our salon has 24 people and most of them use their parking pass and they usually work part time. So the other three days nobody is using their spot. Ravenschlag: We oversell at 40% but we need to better evaluate what the oversell is or even if there is a cap. Schroyer: So if you sell twice as many at even half the price you make the same amount of money but you have more utilization. Kirkpatrick: So our agenda item was to review the work plan for 2016. Did anyone have additional comments on the 2016 work plan? We’ve thrown out some ideas; Kurt has suggested some ideas for the 2017 work plan. Would it be okay to ask you all for a suggested list for us to look at in November? Ravenschlag: Yes, we can absolutely do that. Kirkpatrick: Do we have anything else for November? Ravenschlag: I think we had BFO on there incase there was any engagement or if you had any questions on what was funded. Kirkpatrick: And it will be over, so you will give us a report of what was funded. Maybe that will help form our 2017 work plan suggestions. I won’t be here in November, that’s the day my daughter gets sworn in as a judge. We haven’t typically met in December. DRAFT Meeting Minutes October 10, 2016 Page | 15 Ravenschlag: Correct we block out December. Hewitt: So one comment would be for you to say essentially to the board, how can you utilize the Parking Advisory Board more? It’s a sounding board, which is important, but could it be more than that? I don’t know what that looks like, I’m just throwing that out there. Ravenschlag: Absolutely, what I just suggested are areas where I would love feedback from this board. Like I mentioned the RP3 program is probably the most controversial thing we are doing. Feedback from you all would be really helpful on that program as we move forward. The stadium parking is sort of a slow boil right now that I could see becoming very controversial next year. Kirkpatrick: We could have a panel or a presentation from the developers so we could learn more about it. Ravenschlag: And the technology specifications are certainly an area that we value your input on. 8. ACTION ITEMS A. Support Downtown plan Parking Policies 9. REPORTS A. BOARD REPORT None B. STAFF LIAISON REPORT None 10. OTHER BUSINESS None 11. ADJOURN Criswell motions to adjourn and Schroyer seconds. Meeting adjourned 6:46pm. Respectfully submitted, Katlyn DeMallie Administrative Clerk II Transfort