The crunch of parking
Barbara Diamond
Mid-Laguna residents are hoping city officials will help them iron
out a parking crunch in their area that has caused residents and
businesses to compete for scarce parking spots.
City officials met Jan. 25 with residents and business
representatives to begin a collaborative effort to resolve
residential street parking problems in the area between Thalia Street
and Bluebird Canyon from South Coast Highway to Temple Terrace.
Some in the business community believe a parking structure is the
best way to resolve the issues.
“Whatever we do, we have to do right,” said Councilman Steven
Dicterow who chaired the meeting. “We want to thank the council for
this effort,” said Tom Garvin, president of the Flatlanders
Neighborhood Assn., who brought the issues to the Council’s
attention. “It is great that you gave us this time.”
Dicterow volunteered to serve on a council subcommittee to further
study the problem and asked Councilwoman Jane Egly to join him. The
subcommittee will need approval of the council.
About 50 people attended the workshop, conducted in a less formal
format than the usual council meetings.
The council came down off the dais and set no time limits on
speakers, who were allowed more than one shot at the hand-held
microphone that was passed around the audience.
Darrylin Girvin reviewed a chart prepared by Flatlanders
volunteers which showed the number of businesses with inadequate or
no parking for customers or employees. The lack drives them into the
neighborhood streets where they don’t have to feed meters, Girvin
said. .
“This causes parking and circulation difficulties, [affects]
safety, and homeowners can’t find a place to park in front of their
own homes.” Girvin said. “We estimate that 300 to 400 employees are
parking in the neighborhood. The Pottery Shack will add another 50 to
80.”
The proposed remodel of the Pottery Shack brought the Flatlanders
parking problem to a head.
“The greatest impacts are the successful businesses,” Flatlander
Rik Lawrence said. “They have outgrown their space. We expect the
same thing from the Pottery Shack. Before it opens, it will have
outgrown its space.
“We want the businesses to be successful, but everyone has to get
together and work it out.”
Part of the problem is that many businesses in the older
commercial district have not been required to provide their own
parking spots for customers.
Parking for many of the businesses in the Flatlanders’ area was
“grandfathered in.” That means that the businesses were given credit
for the number of spaces which became required for their kind of
business when the city established its parking codes.
“In early Laguna, lots of apartments and businesses were built
without any parking,” Mayor Elizabeth Pearson-Schneider said. “When
we established parking standards later, credits were grandfathered
in, based on the uses.”
One parcel was credited with more than 150 spaces, without one
foot of real parking. If the uses stay the same, the grandfathering
stays valid.
Flatlanders Environmental Officer Roger von Butow called them
“phantom spaces”, a phrase coined by former Councilman Wayne
Peterson.
“Grandfathering is a state law over which we have no
jurisdiction,” Dicterow said.
Parking requirements are included in conditional use permits
issued for businesses that require them, and continue to be in force
while the use continues.
NO QUICK FIX
Representatives of the Laguna Beach Chamber of Commerce and
mid-town business owners, who attended the workshop, expressed
willingness to work on a solution to the Flatlanders problems.
“We are open and eager to solve the problems,” said John Gates of
the Surf & Sand hotel. “There is no easy fix.”
Gates admitted he was frustrated because private parking lots that
are used only during the day are not available for joint usage by
businesses that need additional parking at night.
“Insurance is costly for businesses to allow parking on private
lots,” said Councilwoman Cheryl Kinsman.
Kinsman and her husband own a business in South Laguna with
plentiful parking. She said she was advised by her insurance agent
not to lease the parking area, and that neighbors vehemently opposed
the notion.
“The business community wants to grow and prosper,” Chamber
Executive Director Verlaine Crawford said. “The bottom line is that
more will come and we have to find a way to park them. The only way
is a parking structure.”
The City Council is pursuing peripheral parking at the north and
south ends of town to augment public parking.
“Don’t get frustrated if we are moving slowly,” Dicterow told the
workshop participants.
He said the job of the sub-committee and the participants would be
to define the problems and the causes and then reach conclusions,
which could be applied to other neighborhoods.
“When we fix your problem, we will fix Laguna’s problem,”
Councilwoman Toni Iseman told the Flatlanders.
“Let the local businesses know that it is to everyone’s advantage
to make Laguna a parkable town.
Egly wasn’t so sure that was the right road to travel.
“Maybe we should be looking at making it not a parkable town,”
Egly said. “Laguna is not a city that was designed for large masses
of cars.”
Pearson-Schneider said the city should start by conducting an
inventory of business parking spaces and compliance CUPs on both
sides of South Coast Highway and Glenneyre Street.
A Downtown parking and traffic management study by a consultant is
underway.
Those who would like to participate in future workshops can be
added to a contact list by sending their names, home and e-mail
addresses and telephone numbers to c.bright@lagunabeachcity.net or by
calling (949) 497-0705.
The next meeting is set for 5 p.m., Feb. 16 at City Hall, 505
Forest Ave.
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