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HomeMy WebLinkAbout08-13-09 Parking Commission Minutes Bozeman Parking Commission Meeting August 18, 2009 at 7:30 a.m. Upstairs Conference Room of City Hall Parking Commissioners in Attendance: Chris Pope Lisa Danzl-Scott Pam Bryan Tammy Hauer Chris Naumann City Staff in Attendance: Shannon Fish, Parking Clerk Paul Burns, Parking Manager Laurae Clark, Treasurer Andy Epple, Planning Director Chris Saunders,Assistant Director Guests in Attendance: Brian Caldwell, Thinktank Action Items: N/A 0:00:04 7:35:59 7:30 – Call to Order Chris Pope called the meeting to order at 7:35 a.m. 0:00:47 7:35:45 7:31 – 7:35 – Approval of July minutes Chris Pope made a suggestion that in the future he would like the minute approvals to show the number of votes in favor or against. Tammy made a motion to approve the minutes from July 2009 and Lisa seconded. The minutes were unanimously approved. 0:02:37 7:36:29 7:35 – 7:50 – Security concerns at garage, Mint Dental Mint Dental on the corner of Black and Mendenhall was broken into and a computer and an I-pod were stolen. They would like to meet with Paul since they were told by police that someone probably swung something into their window to break it. Mint Dental did request to be at this meeting but they did not attend. They do work till later in the evening and when it gets dark they noted that the garage does have skateboarders and they are nervous to enter the garage due to some of this activity. Paul has asked for increased patrol in the garage through Rich but has noted that the numbers of entries through the gates by the officers have decreased almost by 50%. Chris Pope would like to manage the overall safety and security in the garage and believes that the commission would like to see this as well. He also noted that the enforcement does need to pick up but that is something that needs to be dealt with by the police officers and staff. Pam does believe that there has to be increased presence in the garage and hopefully the police can start checking a little bit more. Paul will contact Marty Kent and show him some of the numbers. He believes that they might not know that the numbers have decreased. 0:17:37 7:38:19 7:50 – 8:10 – Manager Report (including budget), Paul The big blue P's are finally up on the garage walls. They are on a timer for now, to help save some electricity. Paul is waiting to hear from Montana Arts Council to see if MSU's backing out of the mural project will affect the grant money, none of which has been spent yet. The quilt show will be at the Emerson after all this year. They weren't convinced they would be safe from the weather. So they will not be using the Garage at all. NWE is finishing up with the gas work. Paving is the next part in line and Paul was hoping that it might be done by September 1st, 2009. This is not a definite though. All of the cinder blocks inside and out of the garage were painted and filler was used. Paul noted that it looks very good. There are timers now in place on the 2nd and 3rd decks of the garage. They are set to go on before sunset and then off right after the sun come up. Paul noted this should help with the power bills. The intercom button has been pushed 55 times since June 12th. Of those, 40 occurrences were on weekends, holidays and after hours. Paul will be out of town August 19-23 and Laurae will be the main backup. If necessary Shannon will help when needed. Rich, Paul, Chris K and Mark Tymrak will be meeting on August 24th to discuss the parking enforcement transition. Paul has created a document detailing how he sees the transition occurring. Chris Pope and Chris N. noted the revenue numbers from the last meeting. Naumann would like to see next meeting how having all of the officers on duty and working downtown would change the deficit amount. He wants to know how much of our red amount would be taken care of. Paul and Rich and the parking crew had 12 interviews last week. The number one declined due to the city's background check policy. Number 2 accepted. Number 3 declined due to pay. They will begin the process all over again soon for the 3/4 time position. Paul passed out the budget and the numbers have not changed much but it was noted that a month ago the deficit was $116,000 and now the number is only $90,000. He is hopeful that the deficit will continue to drop like that. Paul will present to the City Commission on August 24th the proposal to increase citations from $15-$20. Rich and Greg Sullivan were great contributors to the effort. The city commission will get the first look at the boot ordinance on September 14th. Rich, Greg, Susan and Shannon are working behind the scenes on this one. Paul will present to the City Commission on September 8th, 2009 a change in the MSU residential ordinance that excludes Irving School on South 8th from the parking district. Debbie Arkell, Susan, Brian Heaston and Jon Henderson have contributed to this effort. Paul would like to discuss the snow removal budget. He would like to know if we have to plow the top level or do we need to see what the winter brings first. At this point Tammy suggests maybe waiting to see how the winter goes. Chris Pope and everyone agreed that we should get the maintenance contract for the rest of the floors but to leave the top floor alone at this point. Chris Pope senses that when we get into the boot ordinance and changing the ticket fines that he would like to see a press release for all of these changes. He would like to see the Parking Commission in the release so that it is just not an ordinance and a black and white change. He stated that in order to provide free parking that we need to be able to work together to mold that type of a message, so that when Paul goes before the commission that we have something to say about this topic and we can frame the conversation. Chris Naumann will try to get something together for this. 0:47:28 7:53:21 8:15 – 8:55 – City parking regulations, Planning Department Andy Epple and Chris Saunders attended to discuss parking regulations for the planning department. They noted that there have been some changes in the legislature. This brings up the whole parking topic and they wanted to bring to our attention that they view the parking requirements as an overall part of the system. They view it as a part of the various modes of transportation. They have seen the recommendations out of the LMN Study and they would like to see how the Parking Commission feels so that everyone can be on the same page. Andy quoted Yogi Berra "Nobody goes down there anymore it's too crowded." He noted that there are people who say this about Bozeman but he believes that now is a good time to look at the parking requirements since we have opened the garage. Andy stated that the LMN is suggesting that we get rid of the cash-in-lieu program but Chris believes that this program has allowed people to build more real estate. The only time to not have cash-in-lieu would be when and if we did not have any parking requirements. This is not a suggestion but is noted as a change. Chris Naumann noted that most of the consultants were out of town but there were local people as well looking at the city. One suggestion was to reduce the parking requirement to one space per residential unit. Right now it is 1.5 for a 1 bedroom unit. A reduction in office development would be for 2 per thousand square feet and right now it is 4 per thousand square feet. Another suggestion was that only businesses downtown that had over 3000 sq ft for example would have to buy cash-in-lieu spaces or have any parking requirements at all. Chris Pope said that with something like this in the back we still have a cash-in-lieu pickup. Chris Naumann believes that we should definitely get rid of the notion that Cash-in-lieu would fund another parking garage. Chris Saunders agreed that the modern version should be changed and adapted to the fact that we have a parking garage. Chris Naumann suggested that we use a sliding scale to change the price of a space depending on what is being built. Chris Pope wants to know how ready we are to jump into the new vision of what LMN is asking us to do. He would like to see this project and idea run. Pam believes that there are quite a few areas downtown that can be part of this change and it might be an inviting message. Chris Pope wants to know if this suggestion for the 3000 sq ft is going to be looked at by the planning department. Some things that the planning department will be looking at are: 1. Switch current minimums to maximums 2. Set intermediate standards based on characteristics and must be in structures parking facility. 3. Change base parking requirements for selected uses and or locations per dwelling downtown. 4. Provide for additional means of residential parking. 5. Allow for parking management plan to reduce required parking, may coincide with development of parking districts. 6. Local special standards eg; North 7th Avenue. 7. Allow transit based reductions on minimums in all locations. 8. Exempt first defined area amount from parking provision requirements. Brian noted that there is an argument on how much parking you can live with and still rent and not feel like there is no parking. Parking requirements, he believes should be lessened to agree with the new parking garage that we have now. Chris Pope believes that another aspect is that when we relax to create density and growth that we have a plan for how we deal with this new change. He knows that there will be another aspect to this change. He would like to see more than just one person okay with this change. One thing that always comes up is that we want to lease spaces in the parking garage instead of having cash-in-lieu spaces. Chris Pope and Pam found out before this meeting that you cannot have a perpetual lease because of the Federal grant money that was used for the garage. Brian understands that contracts for one year would be accpetable and that you can do just annual leases or in the surface lots that are not under federal laws. If we did just do annual leases then it would be a little scary to have a month to month lease for a parking space, but it would satisfy some portions of parking. Pam noted that doing this would allow us to rent out more spaces in the Garage in the future. Chris Pope would like to see a letter sent out to some of the damaged property owners or to others that want to build downtown to tell them what is going to be changing or happening at this point. Andy said that with some of the businesses wanting to rebuild that if they can make it work with the cash-in-lieu program right now then they should be okay with the new ideas. Pam noted that as a commission we would like to be involved and informed of all the new ideas and changes that are going to be happening. There is a path of the DIP (Downtown Improvement Plan) that will go in front of the City Commission on November 9th. 1:38:23 8:23:11 8:55 – New business/Public comment Brian Caldwell stated the condo units will be putting in some security measures for the retail spaces and he will be bringing some more ideas back to the Parking commission at a future date. He will explain what kind of equipment they are using and how it works. 1:39:30 9:14:06 9:00 – Adjournment The meeting was adjourned at 9:17 am. Respectfully submitted by: Shannon Fish