After six months of work, the downtown parking task force that the City Council formed late last year is about ready to hand up recommendations that could help address Davis’ downtown parking conundrum.

On Wednesday, the task force will meet to discuss and potentially pick one of three strategies that would markedly change the way the city manages its existing downtown parking supply, a key step before possibly tackling the issue of adding new parking.

The main difference between the plans appears to be whether to convert existing on-street spaces downtown into paid parking or to turn them into 90-minute spots rather than the two-hour variety.

Either change, says Brian Abbanat, city transportation planner, likely would free up more downtown parking spaces.

“The only purpose of (these strategies) is to make sure parking is available for customers,” Abbanat said. “Those are the highest-priority users of the downtown parking supply.”

The on-street paid parking option would convert about 470 spaces in the Core Area, or the heart of the downtown, into metered parking, potentially with four-hour time limits.

The second scenario would convert some on-street parking in the Core Area to 90-minute spaces, but leave the rest of the parking downtown as two-hour spaces.

The third option would limit all downtown street parking spaces to 90 minutes except for the Second, Third, E and F Street block faces — plus the block faces across those streets — where paid parking would be implemented. From there, the city potentially could look at expanding the on-street parking.

“We would only price it as high as we need to, to ensure that there’s one or two spaces on each block face,” Abbanat said.

Meanwhile, giving the task force even more to think about, members of the Davis Downtown parking committee have offered a different solution that would transition several of the surface lots downtown into paid parking.

Alzada Knickerbocker, owner of The Avid Reader and one of the committee members in favor of the change, said it’s important to enable customers to park more readily and for longer periods of time.

However, Jennifer Anderson, owner and president of Davis Ace Hardware and a parking task force member, believes that adding more paid parking, not just in the surface lots but also on the street, could put the downtown at a competitive disadvantage to other shopping centers in the area.

“I believe that we as a community need to compete with our neighboring shopping centers (in the region),” Anderson said. “Sacramento and Woodland and Vacaville, none of those places have paid parking and I really believe that it’s important for our customers to feel very welcome downtown.”

Abbanat says that street parking is most desirable for downtown shoppers and diners, which is why it makes sense to charge for those spaces rather than the surface lots.

“Put paid parking on the street, you price it so that there’s always one or two spaces available on the street, and then you make the off-street lots and off-street garages lower-cost,” Abbanat said. “Those who are cost-sensitive, and your employees, have a place where they can go and the customers have the most convenient parking.”

While opinions may vary on whether to add meters along the streets or in the surface lots, or to shorten parking time limits, it seems that there is consensus about addressing the problem of downtown workers taking up prime parking spaces.

Knickerbocker said the task force identified this as a problem during the course of its meetings.

To combat the situation, the severity of which Abbanat says is difficult to gauge, each of the three options incorporates the same set of baseline changes with which the task force almost unanimously agrees.

Most notably, the baseline changes would expand X permit parking — traditionally utilized by downtown employees — while also moving that parking farther out of the Core Area to open up more spaces for consumers in the heart of the downtown.

In addition to adding X permit parking to non-centralized downtown streets, the task force also will look at approaching the Old North Davis neighborhood for use of its streets to transplant employee parking, as well as the Fourth and G parking garage. Those possibilities could open up more than 400 spaces.

The baseline changes also call for shifting the police enforcement schedule an hour later in the day to deter those who regularly violate parking laws during the peak hours at night — especially on weekends — when the downtown is most congested.

The task force also may recommend creating a voluntary private shared-parking district where downtown businesses could volunteer their spaces that often go unused after employees leave for the day.

The task force meets at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday in the Activity Room of the Davis Senior Center, 646 A St. Once the group makes its recommendations, they will be brought to the City Council for review. Abbanat hopes to have something finalized within the next two meetings.

— Reach Tom Sakash at [email protected] or 530-747-8057. Follow him on Twitter at @TomSakash

EstParkLotW

The E Street Plaza is the site of the only paid parking in downtown Davis. That could change if the city’s parking task force recommends more paid on-street parking. Fred Gladdis/Enterprise file photo

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