Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAbout03-01-2020 Public Comment - D. Pickard - Parking Benefit DistrictsDale Pickard 527 No. Montana Bozeman MT dpickard@bresnan.net March 1, 2020 Re: Parking proposal Dear City Commissioners, My wife and I have lived in our home at 527 No. Montana for ~35 years. The home we own and remodeled was originally moved to the very small lot with no provision for off street parking. We also own commercial property at 501 East Peach, which I fear will be subject to similar ordinances in the near future. That property was thankfully required to have minimum parking and some allowance for snow removal. I am pleased that our commercial business and those others in our building are NOT reliant on street parking especially as I witness an unprecedented explosion of traffic and parked cars in the surrounding Northeast neighborhood. Because we live and work in the neighborhood, we have primarily relied on walking and bicycling for much of our transportation over the years. I have read all of the documents provided to the City Commission including the consultant’s report and the proposal itself. In addition, I have spent some time researching what I think is the ideological foundation of the proposal itself. This foundation is singularly expressed in a the book, “The High Cost of Free Parking” by economist Donald Shoup of UCLA. If you haven’t read this, I urge you to, so that you can verify what I write here. Some of this you can find in the Wikipedia article on the book. From reading this book and other work by Dr. Shoup online, I learned that the consultant’s report, the proposal itself and the policies in the proposal are derived almost entirely from this book. Everything in the proposal and the consultant’s report is viewed through this lens and notably, it does not focus on or identify specific issues challenging Bozeman, but instead serves strictly as a sales pitch for Dr. Shoup’s singular economic ideology. I found this suspect. I learned that, by his own admission, Dr. Shoup, a “free-market”, economist, is rather alone with his ideas among other professionals in the field, especially traffic engineers and urban planners. He explains opposition and resistance to his ideas by insisting that they are “paradigm breaking” and only he has been able to crack this conventional paradigm. There is much of this in the book, including a number of failed but amusing analogies to his own self-described singular insight. This insight is summed up in one sentence, from the Wikipedia article on the book, the elements of which you can find in the current parking proposal and the consultant’s report. This is the ideology that the proposal seeks to become public policy. “He [Shoup] suggests [Cities] charging fair market prices for curb parking, returning parking revenue to neighborhoods for community investment, and removing the requirements for off- street parking for new development.” This ideology and the policy before the commission call for recognition of neighborhood curbside parking as an “asset” to be “leveraged” by renting use of the neighborhood streets for parking. In classic fashion the proposal seeks to use prices to regulate demand. However, revenue generated is not invested in more adequate parking in afflicted areas but instead is used to grow and maintain a parking enforcement authority. Moreover, the cost of this program is not borne by the community as a whole but is placed entirely on the property owners that are most afflicted. • The parking proposal calls for the Parking Commission to determine who is forced to pay for parking on their own neighborhood streets by their 85% rule. Not transparent is how or when, especially what season, this 85% occupancy is calculated or what it means in terms of real facts on the ground for any given neighborhood or street, especially in old Bozeman. Once so designated a neighborhood will be “managed” for 85% so it will never change. • The proposal calls for the commission to set “fair market rates” for parking in neighborhoods with no transparency into how these rates are set or what makes them fair. The proposal does require that the rates be sufficiently high as to fund the bureaucratic investment in the overhead to create, maintain and operate the parking district. However, it gives no indication how much funding is required as the amount of parking “management” is scaled up. We are told that the district will be maintained and enforced through regular surveillance of the neighborhoods with license plate readers. Apparently now night- time has been added to the ordinance so we can presume after dark surveillance. Other than the obvious loss of privacy brought on by data trolling license plate readers, one has to wonder at the cost of the burgeoning parking bureaucracy that must be necessary to maintain it. • The proposal calls for the City to plan to profit from the operation of the district - this is necessary to provide the “parking revenue return” to the neighborhoods promised in the proposal. The proposal mentions funding of “curbside improvements” with “excess revenue” but doesn’t explain how this revenue is calculated or what is meant by “curbside improvements.” While everyone believes that the program will be managed to create “excess funds” - no one believes that any money or improvements will be returned to the neighborhood. I think this promise is intended to mislead. I think that the proposed program will be expensive enough to implement and maintain, and that the rates will have to be higher than necessary to return anything of value to our neighborhoods. • The proposal provides the means for developers to externalize their parking costs onto the surrounding neighborhoods, thus maximizing their profits. Dr. Shoup’s third tenet is that developers should not be held to minimum off-street parking requirements for their projects and that planning should allow developers to rely on renting City owned parking, including curbside parking, for their projects. The problems we are addressing here do not exist as a result of the proximity to a High School or a University. Parking problems in the neighborhoods surrounding the downtown district are the result of the very recent massive developments that provide for too little parking for their tenants, residents or employees. These are private, commercial, for profit ventures.* Parking problems in the neighborhoods that do exist clearly result from building and business developers providing inadequate parking. The proposal calls for selling or renting curbside parking on surrounding neighborhood streets to neighborhood residents and to non-residents at increased prices. This represents a clear subsidy to developers and incentive for them to build with inadequate parking and externalize those costs onto the residents of the surrounding neighborhoods. While owners and tenants of the very expensive new downtown housing may be readily able to afford to pay for “market price” parking in other people’s neighborhoods - employees and service workers of Downtown businesses will have no choice but to subtract these costs from their income. Externalizing the costs of development increases the profit margins of the developer at the expense of the community. Doing so by decreasing or eliminating minimum parking requirements has the effect of extorting residents to pay to turn our residential neighborhoods into paid parking lots and thorough fares to downtown for non- residents. Recently, following this same ideology, the Cottonwood project in the NE neighborhood was approved with much less parking than was recommended by City planning. This decision by the City to ignore planner’s recommendations directly increased profits to the developers while externalizing parking costs and impacts to the neighborhood. This is not so much protection of the threatened parking needs of neighborhood residents as it is a protection racket. Neighborhood residents whose streets have been afflicted with the impact of over-development downtown are targeted to pay again for City services that un-afflicted neighborhoods take for granted by means of tax dollars already spent. This proposal recognizes our parking conflicts as a market which can support a growing bureaucracy that creates revenue and provides for itself without really addressing or compensating for the need for more parking downtown. No problem is solved and the quality of life and value of our tax contributions as residents of Bozeman suffers, especially for those of us captive in afflicted neighborhoods. Because these problems were created by past bad decisions on the part of the City, it is up to the City taxpayers to come up with progressive investments in actually solving problems. Before we add injury to insult for the surrounding neighborhoods, taxpayers will have to find ways to fund actual parking solutions, similar to the current parking garage. If there is money available to have created these problems there should be money available for real solutions. There is no amount of market based hocus-pocus that will substitute for actually acting to solve the problem in real terms that tax paying citizens and traffic engineers and drivers understand even if rent-seeking economists and self- serving developers don’t. Onerous parking taxes, expanding parking police, and building burgeoning databases on the habits of citizens in targeted local neighborhoods should not be allowed to substitute for real investments in tangible solutions. Respectfully, Dale Pickard * For an example in Bozeman of a housing project that does provide for adequate parking for the development, see the Village Downtown which serves as a true asset to our community and example of the benefits of planning for off street parking. The units available in the massive buildings downtown are likely as expensive but come without obvious parking benefits.