EVERETT — The cat-and-mouse game that hundreds of office workers play with city parking enforcement officers every workday in downtown Everett could soon change.
The City Council agreed this week to pay an Oregon consultant up to $100,000 to develop strategies to make it more difficult for parking scofflaws to game the downtown parking system.
The result could be the reintroduction of parking meters, increasing fines for parking violations and high-tech tools to help parking enforcement officers do their jobs better.
This is how the downtown parking game is played now:
Instead of paying to park in off-street garages and lots, hundreds of downtown office workers take up a good chunk of the nearly 2,000 free parking spaces lining downtown streets. This makes it harder for people doing business downtown to find parking.
Most on-street spaces are time-limited from 30 minutes to two hours, but many people watch the clock and re-park their cars to avoid tickets.
The city has rules against this, but re-parking violations can be difficult to prove when challenged in court, said Everett Police Sgt. Jim Phillips, who is in charge of parking enforcement in north Everett.
It’s also a manpower issue, with just one parking enforcement officer to cover all of downtown at any given time.
Dick Ryan, a Snohomish County government employee who carpools and splits a $70 monthly fee to park at the county’s 1,200 stall underground parking garage, said he understands the city’s motivation to crack down on illegal parking.
“I see a lot of people playing the game and it causes an enforcement problem and it doesn’t seem customer-friendly when we’re trying to bring people to downtown,” he said.
While finding on-street parking can be a challenge when concerts or hockey games are taking place at Comcast Arena at Everett Events Center, people can usually find a parking space within a few blocks of where they’re going.
“It’s pretty nice compared with the rest of the suburban Seattle area,” said K.C. McGowan, a Bellevue businessman, who was walking from the Everett Mutual tower on his way to a lunch meeting earlier this week.
And compared with downtown Seattle?
“That’s a no-brainer: It’s easier,” said Richard Loeppky of Mukilteo, who was on his way to a doctor appointment downtown.
Still, city officials say they want to get ahead of expected downtown growth, which will almost certainly bring more cars.
About 3,800 people live and 9,700 people work downtown today. By 2025, Everett planners expect 7,500 downtown residents and 14,000 workers.
The Everett City Council voted Wednesday to hire Barney &Worth of Portland, Ore., to study parking downtown and to prepare a downtown parking management plan.
The study will include outreach and interviews, monitoring parking patterns and a cost-benefit study looking at new “smart” parking meters and other new technology.
“We aren’t interested in trying to make it more difficult for people to come into our downtown,” Everett traffic engineer Ryan Sass said. “We want to make it more efficient.”
Sass said the parking study could result in recommendations for changes to time limits for downtown street parking, parking meters or a combination.
He said there are other possible solutions, including inductive loops under parking spaces that can detect expired parking times, or computerized scanners that allow parking enforcement officers traveling at up to 20 mph to read license plates and record the time and location of parked cars.
The idea for meters was a key recommendation of the Everett Downtown Plan, which the City Council unanimously approved last year. The plan calls for funneling money collected at new parking meters into improvements that benefit downtown.
Landscaping, trees, decorative streetlights and increased police protection are just a few amenities that could be paid for with the added money.
Everett City Councilman Drew Nielsen said Barney &Worth, which recently did a study for Salem, Ore., recommending against parking meters, challenged the city’s assumption that parking meters should be installed right away.
Instead, the consultant told Salem officials to reconfigure timed parking spaces downtown.
Karen Yaji of Everett, waiting for a friend outside of Yupa’s Thai Cusine on Colby Avenue this week, said she hopes Everett will not install meters downtown anytime soon.
“We don’t need parking meters,” she said. “This is Everett, for Pete’s sake.”
Reporter David Chircop: 425-339-3429 or dchircop@heraldnet.com.
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