Creating enough spots for everyone

By: PAUL SISSON - Staff Writer | Wednesday, September 17, 2003 11:17 PM PDT ∞

OCEANSIDE ---- Multistory buildings planned for the city's downtown core will gobble up nearly 500 parking spaces over the next few years, a consultant told the Oceanside City Council on Wednesday.

Bill Dvorak, of the Los Angeles firm Kimley-Horn and Associates Inc., recommended several ways to ensure that the city has enough public parking as development moves forward. His ideas ranged from more strictly enforcing time limits on downtown parking spots to building a $12 million, 710-space parking garage.

The council accepted Dvorak's downtown parking study on a 3-2 vote with members Esther Sanchez and Jim Wood voting no. Both noted that city staffers have only given them an unspecified executive summary of Dvorak's parking study for review and not the full document itself.

"I for one feel I'm being asked to rubber stamp something," Sanchez said.

Both Sanchez and Wood noted that the study does not include the city's position on allowing private businesses to use public parking for their customers and employees.

"I think we could do better," Sanchez said.

Mayor Terry Johnson replied that the study is only a starting point for solving future downtown parking problems.

"There is room for improvement in everything that you do in life," Johnson said.

He added that the council will have separate debates on individual remedies such as building a new parking garage.

Several multimillion dollar projects are headed for downtown Oceanside in the next two to three years.

Developer Jim Watkins has submitted plans for a $75 million, seven-story time-share to be built on Pier View Way. Los Angeles developer Southland Companies is also close to sealing a deal that would build a six-story mixed-use building at Mission Avenue and Cleveland Street.

Dvorak calculates that those projects, and several smaller redevelopment projects, will remove 476 off-street parking spaces from the city's existing 2,217-space downtown inventory.

"Your supply is going to go down, when your demand goes up," Dvorak explained.

A new parking garage to be built at the Oceanside Transit Center at Cleveland Street and Mission Avenue will add 450 parking spots that the public can use at night and on weekends, he said.

"That will absorb the spaces we lose from the development projects that are coming up in the next two or three years," Dvorak said.

Though the parking garage at the transit center should offer enough public parking in the short term, there are still many vacant lots downtown that are expected to be developed in the next five to 10 years.

In addition to building a second new parking garage on a city-owned lot at Pier View Way and Cleveland Street, Dvorak also recommended replacing parallel parking spots on some downtown streets with angled parking to increase on-street inventory by 20 percent to 25 percent.

Councilman Jim Wood said he agrees with the Dvorak's recommendations to increase on- and off-street parking, though he was unsure that the city should bear the brunt of the cost, given that individual developers and business owners end up benefiting from increased parking.

"I don't want to subsidize developers for parking," Wood said.

However, Councilman Rocky Chavez disagreed. He noted that ample public parking can be an effective redevelopment tool, because new businesses value locations with room for plenty of customers to park.

"I would say that parking is part of the larger (redevelopment) environment," Chavez said.

Contact staff writer Paul Sisson at (760) 901-4087 or psisson@nctimes.com.