EVERETT — Can’t find parking downtown? That might be a good thing.
The gradual rebound of the economy has led to more business activity, and that means commuters, visitors and anyone else with something to do downtown needs a bit more parking karma to get a decent spot.
In 2015, the city of Everett will undertake a new parking study to develop policies to more efficiently manage on-street parking and possibly encourage the development of more off-street capacity. The new study will be similar to the last one, seven years ago.
“In 2008, when we completed our study, we were right at the end of the last boom business cycle,” city engineer Ryan Sass said.
Then the economy went sour.
“Things happened, the world changed and that economic paradigm was pretty much over,” Sass added.
“You didn’t need to do a formal study to see parking utilization was way down and business occupancy was way down,” he said.
A new study won’t be completed until later in the year, but the city has already taken steps to add parking capacity downtown.
The city adopted regulations that require Snohomish County to provide 312 parking spaces for a planned new courthouse building, threatening to derail the entire project.
The city and county are in negotiations, but the disagreement points to a growing need throughout downtown for new spaces and policies.
Likely to be reconsidered in coming months are zoning rules, adopted in 2006, which don’t require new developments to provide parking.
There are some exceptions. Developers of the 156-room Courtyard by Marriott hotel under construction at Colby Avenue and Wall Street, for example, had to reserve 48 parking spaces for city employees to replace spots lost when the hotel took over the block. The site of the hotel used to include a city-owned parking lot.
But the new hotel isn’t required to provide parking for the general public, aside from guests.
A similar situation might be unfolding at the site of the new courthouse at Wall Street and Rockefeller Avenue, across the street from Xfinity Arena.
Current plans only include about 35 spaces for courthouse staff, but the building will have eight stories and 250,000 square feet of office space on a lot that now includes a public parking lot with more than 130 spaces.
“The bigger issue for me is losing 137 or so spots that existed where the courthouse is going to go and not replacing those spots,” City Council President Scott Bader said.
A new parking study would replicate much of what transpired during the one in 2008. City staff or contractors monitored every on-street parking spot, plus a certain percentage of off-street spots, for an entire day.
Policies that emerged from the 2008 study included standardization of a street-parking time limit of 90 minutes and higher fines for “re-parking,” whereby a driver moves a car from spot to spot during the day to avoid the time limit.
This city’s parking reassessment includes hiring a downtown parking manager in 2016, who will create a committee with oversight over city parking policies.
Whether new downtown parking lots or garages are in the future is unknown, but it is something the city will consider, especially if the economy continues to pick up and more development comes to Everett.
“It’s very expensive to build structured parking, so any time you can build a few more when you’re building it anyway, you’re ahead,” Sass said.
Chris Winters: 425-374-4165; cwinters@ heraldnet.com. Twitter: @Chris_At_Herald.
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