HomeMy WebLinkAbout8/24/2021 Item 6a, Schmidt
Delgado, Adriana
From:Richard Schmidt <slobuild@yahoo.com>
Sent:Sunday, August
To:E-mail Council Website
Subject:Item 6A -- Parking districts
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Agenda Item 6A, Parking Districts
Aug. 22, 2021
Dear Council Members,
The changes to the residential parking district rules STINK. They are dishwater dumb, and should be rejected.
(Possible exception: issuance to resident rather than property owner.)
1. The city will issue up to three times the number of permits as there are parking spaces!!! Are you kidding?
Why? Why is it OK for the city to “overbook” parking spaces this way? What are you “permitting” by doing so? The city
gets the permit fees, the residents get nothing. THIS IS COMPLETELY UNETHICAL.
2. The city staff will have “flexibility” to issue more than 2 permits per “addressed unit.” Why is this desirable? Are
2 permits per unit insufficient? If so, why? No evidence is provided. Here’s an example of who might want more than 2
permits per unit. At Palomar and Serrano an entire house has nobody living in it and has been turned into a hotel, with up
to 6 vehicles at a time. Noting that the place had at least 3 parking permits, I inquired of Mr. Fuchs how that was possible
if the limit is 2. He said to provide permit numbers and he’d check; I did, he did, and he told me they were all legitimate
permits, so all was OK. He did imply not all were issued to the same address. So it would seem there is already
“flexibility” in the number of permits available to a property. But, hey, wouldn’t it be nice for this illicit hotel to get the city
to issue 6 instead of 3? That’s what this “flexibility” recommended by staff means on the ground. Is that how the council
wants neighborhoods to operate?
3. This is no minor revision of the ordinance, as staff would have you believe. Just look at the legislative draft’s
extensive deletions and additions. This is a new instrument erected upon the skeleton of an existing ordinance to
mask its counter-revolutionary intentions.
4. The draft ordinance seems careless and has some dynamite lack of clarity that will allow – as time goes on and
clever ones study how to breach it – flotillas of firetrucks to storm through its loopholes. Why do you adopt such
complicated poorly-fabricated ordinances? Something much simpler and more direct would do the job with less potential
future harm.
5. One term in the ordinance that seems especially problematic is “addressed unit,” whatever that means – and that’s
precisely its problem, unclear in intent, subject to interpretation, a time-bomb waiting to go off.
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It seems all of this messing with residential rules is due to the desire of certain “commercial” interests to have a
parking district for reasons made nebulous in the staff report. Staff has responded by modifying residential districts so
commercial districts can sneak in.
Why not just add an ordinance section permitting commercial districts, with their own rules, and leave the
residential section alone?
Why muck up residential districts just to create another way for the city to harass the homeless, which would
seem to be what’s actually going on here with “commercial” districts?
Sincerely,
Richard Schmidt
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