HomeMy WebLinkAbout7/11/2023 Item 8a, Schmidt
Richard Schmidt <
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Subject:Agenda item 8a
Attachments:Item 8a parking districts.pdf
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Please see attached letter regarding this item.
1
Item 8a – Parking districts – Don’t adopt recommended action. Continue as at present.
Staff proposes to suspend the creation of parking district while it fiddles with parking district
philosophy, procedures and rules for a year.
In the face of so many requests for new districts (requests that result from the city’s mean
actions towards residents of neighborhoods like the Anholm district, where the majority of the
heavily-used parking on 3 streets is being removed by council fiat), this is a really bad idea. One
doesn’t throw out the baby because its dirty bath water has largely evaporated. In this case,
staff should continue implementing the existing program till it can come to the council with
suggested modifications.
Council’s correct action, therefore, would be #3, “Provide direction to staff to continue the
Preferential Parking Permit District program under current adopted policies.”
The city’s parking program is in utter disarray. I believe this is due to mismanagement by a city
manager who’d rather build an ever larger bureaucracy of highly-compensated management
and not hire people to do the actual work needed to run a city in a way that benefits residents.
Isn’t a dearth of worker-ants sufficient to do the assigned work exactly what the staff report for
this item skates around? And isn’t your “recognition” earlier in this agenda of two new
management positions being created to oversee the parking program a wonderful example of
how the city manager builds the bureaucracy of aloof bureaucrats rather than staffing worker-
ant positions needed to make the parking program work? This overpopulation of managers and
underpopulation of workers is not limited to the parking group.1
So, why do I say the parking program is in disarray? Here are some current things I’ve observed:
1. This agenda item’s staff report describes a program in disarray.
2. It’s uncertain what residents in parking districts get for the fees they pay to run their
districts. For example, each morning I walk through an overnight-restricted district necessitated
because the city allows corporate student landlords (Valencia, Academy Palomar in this case) to
charge extra for their required off-street parking, so student residents park in surrounding
neighborhoods rather than pay for a parking space. In this district there appears to be little
enforcement since most schoolyear mornings I see many untagged illegally parked vehicles.
1 I have two other recent examples from Public Works. In one, it turns out that even simple tasks like placing
individual sign poles are no longer done by city workers, but are farmed out to contractors. In the other, it turns
out that even the selection of ADA curb cut types and their design isn’t done in-house, but is contracted out, and
that nobody in-house, as I understand the obfuscatory responses I’ve received, accepts any responsibility for the
designs and execution of those designs, even when the designs are sub-standard and clearly don’t meet the needs
and safety of the disabled. These sorts of things lead me to ask, what do staff do other than hire work out to
contractors and consultants?
Once every few weeks somebody comes through and tags a few in a token effort at
enforcement.
3. Sidewalks, widely used by the elderly and those with sticks, canes and walkers, are often
totally blocked by cars parked across them. Until recently we’d call the police department and
they’d promptly send a tech to cite the vehicle. Recently we were informed the police no longer
provide that service, that we’d need to call parking services, where one never speaks to a
person but must leave a message. We’ve never seen evidence there is any followup to these
calls, and the vehicle-parked-on-sidewalk problem continues.
4. Implementation of the one-hour-park-free downtown garage program has been troubled.
Instructions are vague and incomplete, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it. The city manager
responded to my commenting on that by saying it’s simple and only took him 4 minutes. Well,
that must be because he knows how to find his way through a clunky non-user-friendly
program the city paid a lot of money to some vendor to develop. When I tried again I finally
figured out how to get past the big black page that had been a roadblock (why don’t the
instructions tell you how to do that?), then found what the instructions described doing to
proceed differed from what was possible on the pages displayed on my screen. After finally
thinking I was making headway I came to the upload proof of residency box, which contained
no instructions, but was in an upload format I recognized.
At that time I had to switch over to my scanner, I scanned proof of residency, uploaded it, only
to discover my upload was rejected because it wasn’t in one of the two acceptable digital
formats. Now, if only certain formats are acceptable, why isn’t the user told that up front? So I
re-scanned, re-uploaded, only to discover that every time one edits or changes something all
one’s filled in-data from before is gone!!! I went through this rejected-for-incomplete-
information routine about a half dozen times. What a really amateurish software system. It
took me nearly an hour to apply, I got an email stating my application had been received, but
that I couldn’t park free until notified my application had been accepted. To date I’ve heard
nothing. (I am not alone; a long thread on Nextdoor dealt with the confusion and similar
problems many are having.)
5. The much ballyhooed gateless parking garage system was concocted with no consideration
whether it conforms to Americans With Disabilities Act accessibility requirements. Basically, a
person with disabilities, who previously would pay an attendant when exiting, now must traipse
around the garage to find and deal with one of the kiosks. That’s not necessarily possible for a
person with disabilities. The city’s answer, when I raised this matter, was “use the app.” Well,
that’s not ok because not everyone has the wherewithal to use the app; that adds age and
economic discrimination to the ADA problem. I submit the gateless system as it exists is an
ableist/ageist affront to ADA accessibility requirements and is probably actionable. My
response to the city is “make parking in the garage free for the disabled, as on the street, and
your ADA problem is solved.” I really cannot imagine the cost to the city would be significant
enough to notice, and the good will would be worth a lot.
So those are examples of what a top-heavy management structure does to our parking program
in specific and to our city operation as a whole. The city manager should be held responsible by
the council for this mismanagement.
Richard Schmidt