City considers deregulation of parking

SANDPOINT - A hot topic for months, proposed deregulation of downtown parking requirements was put under a spotlight Tuesday at a packed planning workshop.

With representatives from the Downtown Sandpoint Business Association, the City Council and planning department, the workshop addressed a proposed ordinance aimed at significantly altering city-wide parking requirements, including doing away with all requirements for new downtown businesses.

The city's current parking ordinance, which was introduced in 1979, requires businesses to offer a certain number of parking spaces - depending on the size and type of business - or pay the city a $10,000 per space in-lieu fee.

The workshop drew a crowd of several dozen residents and business owners, many of whom offered strong opinions about the state of the city's parking.

Calling the current ordinance arbitrary, ill-conceived and based on a numbers game, local architect Bruce Millard asked the city to make sweeping changes.

"Numbers games in planning do not work," Millard said. "Get this thing moving. Don't sit on it forever. If you're scared of it, make it short-term."

Several speakers echoed Millard's sentiment, but others were unsure if the changes would help downtown business owners.

"I'm not exactly against changing the requirements," said Ivano's owner Jim Lippi. "But if we are going to change them, we need more input from the people doing business downtown."

During a public hearing on the matter at its October session, several members of the Planning Commission voiced reservations about the changes, and that sentiment carried over into Tuesday's workshop.

The commission's chair, Gary Maxwell, said aspects of the proposed changes worry him. Specifically, he wondered aloud weather fewer downtown parking spaces would create a spillover effect in nearby neighborhoods.

"I, being old, like to do things slowly," Maxwell said. "I think if we go slow enough we won't impact the neighborhoods."

Councilman Doug Hawkins Jr. said, in a rebuttal to the idea of tempering the deregulation, that doing away with the regulations would most likely not have an adverse affect on the business community in the short term, but keeping them in place could drive more businesses out of the area.

Noting the relative ease of moving a business to Ponderay, Hawkins added that "the town exists because it's easier to put a business there than it is to put a business in downtown Sandpoint."

The most outspoken critic of deregulation was Sandpoint planning commissioner Dick Hutter, who raised numerous questions about the plan's viability.

"If this plan doesn't work, you won't know it until it has passed the critical stage," Hutter said.

The group also discussed the idea of enacting surface parking maximums for the entire city, prohibiting demolishing structures for the purpose of adding parking spaces and reducing off-street parking requirements for the entire city.

No decisions on the matter were made, and the issue will move back to the planning commission next month before making its way to the full council for a ruling.