Business owners criticize proposed parking rules

Published 12:22 pm Thursday, April 17, 2008

Providing parking for compact cars is an inconvenience that “greatly ties our hands at Aldlerwood mall,” the mall’s general manager Jerry Alder told the Lynnwood City Council at a public hearing April 14 on proposed changes to parking regulations.

Still, Alder said, the city should rethink a proposal to greatly reduce the number of compact parking stalls allowed on private lots because his business uses the small stalls to create workable parking lots and garages.

“Thoughtful locations of compact car parking stalls is a very valuable design tool for making these structures work well for the owner and end-user,” he wrote in a Feb. 12 e-mail to city planner John Bowler.

The parking proposal is one on a list city staff presented to the council which will continue to review the issue.

Lynnwood’s looking into updating 14-year-old parking rules. Those rule changes wouldn’t apply to the City Center zone in the designated future downtown, which will have its own parking rules.

Some of the proposed changes are intended to streamline the permitting process. Other changes fine-tune existing rules.

Some of the highlights of the parking proposal include:

• Allows lots where different businesses or organizations are located to share parking. This would, for example, allow empty parking lots to be used when some businesses are closed.

• Encourages and gives incentives for businesses to create designated bicycle parking areas. To get the incentives, the parking must meet minimum design standards, including a roof.

Alder wasn’t the only one complaining about the proposal. Larry Ingraham, owner of Emerald Properties, a brokerage and development company at 18023 Highway 99, said he’s concerned about businesses that won’t be able to comply with the proposed regulations, a provision that would require raised walkways in some cases and a de-emphasis on compact car stalls.

“Why descriminate against compact cars?” he asked.

Paul Krauss, the city’s community development director, said compact parking is a “highly contentious issue” and that “a lot of people hate it.”

He said studies have shown that compact parking stalls don’t get used as much as larger spaces in places where drivers come and go frequently, such as shopping centers.

“There’s a lot of people who feel big cars are being discriminated against by small cars,” Bowler told council members. “I don’t feel there’s discrimination here. We’re simply saying there are some places where compact parking works well and other places where it creates problems.”

Another developer, Mike Echelbarger, owner of Echelbarger Investments, LLC, told Bowler in a Jan. 22 letter that he was “flabbergasted by the assumptions” in the proposed parking revisions.

“I would characterize this document as generally increasing the parking requirements at a time when the federal, state and county governments as well as many busineses are actively taking efforts to reduce the need for parking,” he wrote.

Krauss said the overall intent of the proposals is to shift the way parking lots are used.

“We want to encourage an urban form and get away from that 1950s-60s Kmart way, away from the street surrounded by a sea of asphalt,” he said after the public hearing.