Front-page story on November 18, 2006, and the problem has gotten worse. Douglas Wilson wants more downtown land but refuses to provide sufficient parking, which will slowly suffocate businesses one at a time. You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you penalize:
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Parking in Moscow
City, business owners and others seek answers to downtown quandary
By Omie Drawhorn, Daily News staff writer
Georgia Toppe will stop to shop at BookPeople or eat at Mikey’s Gyros if she sees a convenient parking spot when she drives through downtown Moscow. If not, she drives right on by. “I used to come downtown more before parking became a problem,” said the Moscow resident.
This is the difference between destination parking and impulse parking, said Bill Parks, a Moscow resident and business owner who has developed a plan to mitigate the problem. “There is always destination parking; if you are going to your lawyer or your hairdresser you are going to find a spot,” he said. “Once people do think there is no parking, they don’t try.”
There has been much debate over the years as to whether there is a downtown parking problem. Some customers and businesses complain that they circle the block countless times before finding a parking space and others claim they never have trouble finding a spot.
Moscow resident Kristine Searcy said she often walks to the downtown area. When she does drive, she usually doesn’t drive more than a block and a half before she finds a parking spot. “I have heard there is a perceived problem, but I haven’t seen it,” she said.
The downtown parking issue has been pushed back into the spotlight over the past year. New Saint Andrews College applied for a conditional use permit for its downtown building and developer Rick Beebe applied for a rezone so he could convert downtown grain elevators into a mix of apartments and retail space.
Throughout the process, people rushed to public hearings to make sure downtown parking was addressed. After years of talking about parking, little has been done to address the problem.
The City Council hopes to change that. It has asked the Moscow Transportation Commission to find a solution. “We have taken this on with the viewpoint that there may or may not be a problem, but people perceive that there is one,” Transportation Commission chairman Walter Steed said. “It seems virtually anything brought up (in front of the city) has a parking component to it.” Steed said the commission is putting together a survey that will be delivered to 275 business owners in the downtown area. The commission is using a parking survey done five years ago by Camas Prairie Winery owner Stu Scott as a base, but it is surveying a larger area. Steed said he hopes to gain a better understanding of what people believe. “If people say there is no problem we will still look at what we should be doing or not doing,” he said.
Julie Kerr, owner of Wild Women Traders Inc., said when it comes to parking, she goes by what customers tell her. “I don’t know how often I’ve heard ‘I stopped because there was a parking spot in front of the store,’” she said. Kerr’s business has been in its downtown location for eight years, and parking has been an issue since it opened. “It has never been resolved; we haven’t done one thing to change the problem,” she said. She said she believes the lack of parking does affect business. “If I could find a place to relocate that wasn’t downtown, I would move,” she said. Kerr does her part by parking a few blocks away and walking to her shop.
Many people believe the employees who work downtown contribute a lot to the parking problem. Scott’s survey indicated that 85 percent of employees who work downtown park there. The businesses questioned a combined 735 people. Scott counted 414 downtown parking spaces on Main Street, Washington Street, and in the Jackson Street lots. Wine Company owner Terry Eckwright, along with the owner of Peck’s Shoe Clinic, recently requested two 20-minute parking zones in front of their businesses. The city granted one 20-minute zone.
Eckwright said people tend to ignore the parking time limits, especially on Saturdays when they know no one will be around to enforce the rules. With people carrying heavy cases of wine to and from his business, it’s important to have a spot open nearby, he said.
Bob Greene, owner of BookPeople and a vocal critic of the downtown parking situation, said he attributes the problem to more people owning cars. He said improvements need to be made to encourage more residents to ride their bicycles. Greene said customers are always complaining to him that they can’t find parking downtown. BookPeople employee Betsy Dickow said it’s a big problem for older people. “The elderly that come downtown need to park nearby,” she said. “There aren’t enough handicapped spots. It’s their town too. I want it to remain special for them.” She said there has never been a parking study done by an official out-of-state firm and she believes that needs to happen.
Jerry Schutz, chairman of the Moscow Planning and Zoning Commission, said the parking issue has come up repeatedly over the last 40 years, but nobody will do anything about it. Schutz said parking started to become a problem after meters were removed from downtown 15 to 20 years ago. “It was once a retail destination; now there are real estate offices and lenders,” he said. “People stay there all day long and feel it is their right to park downtown.” Schutz said many people who work downtown will move their cars every three hours, switching spaces to avoid the three-hour parking limit. “If you want downtown to be a retail trade center you need to look at whether it’s more important for employees or customers to park there,” he said. Schutz said the City Council needs to address the problem. “It may not be the perfect solution, but try something for God’s sakes and stop bitching,” he said. He said parking shouldn’t be an excuse to curb downtown development. “Development is going to happen,” he said. “Not everyone is going to show up with a multi-million-dollar project and be willing to invest in our downtown; we should be embracing, not castigating them.”
Beebe said the purpose of his plan is to create development that would maintain the vibrance of downtown. He has had to make some compromises. The two parcels of land he plans to develop — 625 S. Jackson St. and 803 S. Main St. — were rezoned from industrial to central business. He intended to preserve the grain elevator structures on South Main Street but now must tear them down to fulfill the parking requirement attached by the City Council. “I’m very disappointed to have to do that, but City Council did what they had to do,” he said. He said he agreed with the council’s decision to require 1.5 parking spaces for each tenant, but wondered about apartments that already exist downtown without a parking requirement. “The Moscow Hotel has no parking requirement. The people that are already there are contributing to the parking problem,” he said.
NSA has to fulfill a parking requirement in order to remain downtown. It was recently given two years to find 42 additional parking spaces inside or outside of the city’s central business district. “We have always operated under the notion that if there was any other use of the building it would require at least 42 parking spaces,” NSA Executive Vice President Bob Hieronymus said. He said the school has began seeking additional parking spaces, and it’s too early to tell how difficult the process will be. In the meantime, NSA is giving students credit at its bookstore for leaving their cars at home. The school also has moved classes around to free up parking spaces during the lunch hour. Hieronymus said those moves have been successful. “We are continuing to monitor the parking lot and there continues to be plenty of empty parking spaces,” he said. “There is a parking management challenge that we have, but I don’t think there is a parking space problem.”
Parks said he thinks the solution is to start gradually turning sections of downtown from three-hour parking zones to two-hour zones. Other possibilities include making it a violation to park on the same street for more than two hours, allowing overnight angled parking, creating reserved parking spaces for businesses that need a delivery vehicle and adding parking lots.
In Scott’s study five years ago, he recommended several options, including removal of the downtown parking restriction between 2 a.m. and 7 a.m. Friday and Saturday on a portion of spaces, adding an option to buy reduced price permits for daytime or overnight parking, requiring permits on the four bays at the north end of the north Jackson Street lot and the south end of the south Jackson Street lot, and creating a fund to purchase property for parking.
Karen Young, an acupuncturist who works downtown, said having a hard time finding a parking space isn’t the worst thing for downtown businesses. “I’d rather be worried about parking than have there be plenty of parking and a downtown that is dead and half empty,” she said.
Omie Drawhorn can be reached at (208) 882-5561, ext. 234, or by e-mail at . . .
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