give new flexibility to small business owners, support economic growth, reduce
emissions, and make walking, biking, and transit more appealing. These
amendments were also intended to more it more appealing for people to walk, bike,
and take transit. How does the TDM (travel demand management) work? The City will
provide a menu of tools to make it easier to walk, bike, and take transit. Developers
would choose from that menu for their new development which would support walking,
biking, transit uses. The guide will include tools like subsidized transit passes,
protected bike parking, street calming. The proposed ordinance would be to any
development for 25 or more rental units or 20,000 square feet or more of a non
residential use. In addition to the TDM updates, they would decouple bike parking
requirements from vehicular parking requirement, steam line process and standards for
parking, and other amendments in Chapters 60, 61, 65, and 66. On April 30th, the
Planning Commission held a public hearing. There were 237 comments online and 4
people spoke at the public hearing. The public overwhelmingly supported the options
to eliminate minimum parking requirements. Followed by the status quo, the Planning
Commission met again and voted 17-2 to recommend the City Council adopt the “full
elimination” package of amendments.
Regarding the decoupling of parking requirement form the bike requirements,
Councilmember Tolbert asked are there any parts in the ordinance where you rely on
parking requirements where things are coupled together, other things in the ordinance
that are affected by this. Johnson responded that is part of the amendments in the
other chapters. In the full elimination option, they had to fix the inconsistencies.
Tolbert said this proposal addresses every part of our ordinance that relies on the
parking minimums. Johnson responded that is correct.
Tolbert asked are other things going to happen by the elimination of things that were
coupled together at a previous time. Johnson responded he did not think so. They
didn’t have time to fix, there was something in the storm water ordinance that says if
you go over a minimum, you have to do more storm water things. Without a minimum,
it didn’t make sense so they took it out. They might want to revisit and see if there is
a way to still promote storm water and parking lots.
Tolbert asked is it too complicated. Johnson responded they would have had to
develop another way to do it. They could tie it to a pervious surface coverage. He
couldn’t find another city that has taken that approach.
Tolbert said they have used the parking minimums to give bonuses to other policies
they like or give a trade-off.
Johnson said one of the things minimum parking does is they can decentralize certain
things. Their bike parking is because they want a reduction in minimum parking
requirements. They can lower the bike requirements so they can get more bike
parking. Also, it does not have to be tied to parking and they can get more production
in bike parking that way. They could do shared parking.
Tolbert asked about shared vehicles. Johnson responded a lot of people don’t use
shared vehicles. They want to do EV (electrical vehicle), so he doesn’t see much of a
difference in getting shared.
Councilmember Prince said they still have lots of neighborhoods that are moving
towards permit parking because they don’t want to have the overflow parking from
businesses and neighborhoods. Permit parking is something that we are continuing to
offer at the City. One of the issues with permit parking is that neighborhoods that get
it are thinking they will have good enforcement, but it is hard for parking enforcement
to keep up with enforcing it. Have we looked at whether or not this is going to be