SOUNDING OFF: Correcting parking issue editorial

This is a rebuttal regarding the editorial in the Nov. 23 Coastline titled “Include Area Businesses in Parking Vote.” I feel the article is lacking some important facts and quite misleading.

1. Nowhere in the editorial is there mention that what is being considered is a NIGHTTIME preferential parking program. The editorial assumes that all businesses will be affected by this program, and this is not true. There are a small handful of businesses in the midtown area that create the parking problems for the neighborhoods.

2. Employees and customers currently have access to FREE metered parking during the NIGHTTIME hours because the meters are not in effect during the 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. time frame that the residents have requested to be considered for the program. Yet, there is a large number of metered parking spots on South Coast Highway that sit empty almost all the way to Diamond on both sides of the street, and our neighborhoods are packed with employee and customer cars.

3. The Kaku & Associates parking study conducted in 2005 and paid for by the city confirmed there are many business parking lots in the midtown area that sit empty during the nighttime hours. The businesses that are open at night can make arrangements to lease these lots for employee and customer parking during the nighttime hours just as Mozambique has done to alleviate their parking shortage.

4. I am assuming that the study alluded to in the editorial was the one done by the Chamber of Commerce. The Kaku study, an outside consulting firm, concluded that as long as the businesses are allowed to utilize the neighborhoods for parking employees, they will not work toward solutions to the problem. Take away this option and the businesses will make arrangements for the off-street lots and patrons will valet park. If Mozambique can do it, why can’t this small handful of businesses do it, too?

5. The editorial comment “if resident-only parking wins out, business will be hard-pressed to find long-term, free parking for their employees and their customers may find themselves looking farther for a parking spot and might just drive on instead of stopping to shop” is puzzling. How many customers come to Laguna to shop at night? The current situation in our neighborhood has made it impossible to conduct a neighborhood watch program. There are too many people wandering our streets at night making it difficult to determine who belongs there and who does not. As a result, the Woods Cove neighborhood has recently experienced three residential car thefts, five residential cars vandalized, two parked cars backed into by drunken drivers looking for a place to park and several break-ins. The safety of our neighborhoods far outweighs the need for businesses to have “free” parking for their employees.

It is quite frustrating for those of us who, for the past four years, have attended all of the parking workshops, the presentation by the Kaku consultant, planning commission meetings, Parking/Traffic/Circulation [committee] meetings, etc. to read the misleading information being published by those who have attended few or none of the meetings and are lacking most of the facts.

I thank you for the opportunity to express my views and some facts on the proposed preferential parking program.

BARBARA SLEVCOVE is a member of the Woods Cove Neighborhood Assn.