City Identifies Prime Cause of Downtown Parking Problems

The Village parking problem was supposed to get some attention at last night's Claremont City Council meeting. Specifically, the council was supposed to consider an ordinance that was supposed to help prevent so-called "vehicle shuffling" that adds to the parking nightmares people trying to visit the Claremont Village face with cars stacked up hither and yon filling every possible available space.

A Claremont Courier article by Tony Krickl last week explained the ordinance and the reasons for needing it:

City staff hopes that the “No-Vehicle Shuffling” ordinance will deter business employees from constantly moving their cars to different parking spots within the Village every few hours to avoid being ticketed.

The ordinance would also open up more parking spots to paying customers, a move that some believe will boost business and make the Village a greater attraction.

Something happened, however, that caused the issue to be pulled from the council's agenda for last night. The city's official website carried this bit of news:

A public notice was published stating that the Village Parking Proposed Ordinance would be on the July 8, 2008 City Council meeting agenda. This ordinance has been pulled from that agenda, pending further review by the City Manager. For further information, call Craig Bradshaw, City Engineer, at (909) 399-5465.

Parking policy wonks weren't completely shut out last night, however. The city council spent some time having a discussion of an appeal of a Claremont Planning Commission decision to approve a 162,000 square-foot academic and administrative building on the Claremont McKenna Campus.

As a condition of approval, CMC was required to submit a document showing that they would provide adequate parking for the building. This requirement was part of a new ordinance the city council approved recently to help alleviate downtown parking problems and the adverse parking impacts created by new projects.

So, the Planning Commission in June approved the CMC project and its parking management plan. However, a number of Claremonters, including former Mayor Judy Wright and Ginger Elliot, both very active in Claremont Heritage, objected to the CMC parking plan because it counted parking spots that were nowhere near the new building. For instance, CMC counted parking spots at properties CMC owns in the Arbol Verde section of Claremont - spots that are far enough away from the new building that people going there would not use them.

Seems clear, right? Looks like CMC is playing a numbers game in its parking plan and should be required to rewrite it with more realistic parking projections and mitigations.

Wrong. During the discussion, City Attorney Sonia Carvalho stepped in to quash the discussion by pointing out that the new ordinance requiring a parking plan to be submitted contains no provision for review.

All a developer has to do is submit a plan, any plan, and it must be accepted by the city without review. All those people who showed up ready to argue for or against the CMC project had to sit down. There were no grounds for an appeal because the city's ordinance has no provision for appeals. The city forgot to include that.

Chalk another one up to that crackerjack city staff that wrote the policy, to City Attorney Carvalho, who was supposed to review the ordinance for any such defects before it was approved, and to the Claremont City Council for approving an ordinance with a very serious deficiency. City Planner Lisa Prasse said that was not the intent of the law, but there you have it.

All in all, it was an embarrassing night for everyone who reviewed and voted on the new ordinance, and all (with the exception of Carvalho, who hardly ever admits an error) seemed to acknowledge this was a big mistake.

Tonight's Council Meeting

The Claremont City Council meets tonight at 6:30pm in the City Council chambers at 225 W. 2nd St. in the Claremont Village.

It's a busy agenda tonight as the council and Mayor Ellen Taylor scramble to get all their business done this month before the City Council and city commissions take their traditional August break. Hey, shouldn't we start thinking about reversing this? Let's have them meet in August and take the rest of the year off. You know, above all, do no harm.

Interested parties can also watch the proceedings here tonight beginning at 6:30pm.

In any case, the council tonight at 5:15pm starts with another in a never-ending series of closed sessions in which, the special meeting agenda says, they'll discuss "anticipated litigation" with an unidentified party as well as the possible water company takeover. The council will give a brief report of their closed session after they return for the public portion tonight.

The regular agenda includes the following items of interest:

• The second reading of the new marijuana dispensary ordinance that was approved at the last council meeting.
  
  
• An appeal of the Planning Commission's decision to approve a 162,000 square-foot academic and administrative building on the Claremont McKenna College campus. The appeal has been lodged by Peter Farquhar, Ray Fowler, Lydia Henry, and Ginger Elliot on behalf of Claremont Heritage.
  
  The appeal seems to center around the appellants concern about parking and the way the parking allowances for the new building were figured. City staff, naturally, argues that the appeal should be denied. We'll see who has more clout here, CMC or Claremont Heritage's Ginger Elliot.
  
  
• The renewal of the city's agreement with the Chamber of Commerce, a wholly-owned Claremont 400 subsidiary currently led by photographer Sonia Stump. The proposed new agreement will pay the Chamber $59,935 for the 2008-09 fiscal year and $61,756 for FY 2009-10.
  
  This is a sort of automatic renewal, and we've not seen much public discussion of whether or not the city's merchants are getting a good bang for your tax buck. Has anyone asked if the Chamber has done a good job of increasing foot traffic to the Village or the Village Expansion, not to mention the other areas of town?
  
  
• The proposed $50,000 grant to the Friends of the Claremont Library to fund a special collection of Claremont authors. A reader just commented on this one:
  
  
  I was up early this morning and read the post about the Friends of the Claremont Library asking the city for $50,000 to catalogue books by Claremont authors and several things came to mind. Don't we pay taxes to the county library already to have every book catalogued that is given to or purchased by the county system? Doesn't the county already have many of the books by Claremont authors in it's collection already and have already catalogued these books? Doesn't this city already have plenty of retired librarians that could volunteer to catalogue these books? And lastly, if the city is in such dire need of money with the anticipated shortfalls this year and next, why not put the money into reserves? I also wondered if these books are going to circulate to other libraries in the system or if they are going to circulate at all? If they are not, this is not the best use of taxpayer funds to enable the creation of what will essentially be a private collection, something that is better suited to a private library, not a public library whose beginnings were meant to provide the masses with free circulating books to educate and uplift themselves. I hope the council will reconsider this issue and not respond with a knee-jerk reaction to this request.
  
  Yep.
  
  
• Tree mitigation for homes on Shenandoah Dr. The staff report provides three alternatives (Plans A, B, and C) ranging in price from $251,000 to $511,000. The discussion provides an good window into the true costs of being a Tree City - costs which tend to be ignored until the sidewalk is cracked and lifted up all throughout a neighborhood.
  
  
• A parking permit plan for residents of Via Santa Catarina at the Johnson's Pasture trailhead in Claremont's Claraboya neighborhood.
  
  Another example of what happens when easily foreseeable consequences are ignored. Claremont bought Johnson's Pasture, but failed to deal with the fact that a small residential cul-de-sac with no extra parking sits at the beginning of the trail. As a result, the neighborhood feels overrun with hikers' vehicles taking up all the limited parking along with a perceived increase in crime-risk and general nuisances.
  
  The other way in to the pasture is from the Claremont Wilderness Park entrance over on Mills Ave. A long trek indeed.
  

Punish the Innocent, Reward the Guilty: The Claremont Way

No Parking

Anyone with business downtown, or near the Colleges, knows that parking in certain areas of Claremont has reached infarct status. Because of the continued good planning decisions over the years, Village visitors commonly park as far away as College Avenue as do visitors to the Pomona campus, CMC, Scripps, and the Graduate School blocks to the north. We wonder how many gallons of gasoline are wasted circling, say, City Hall, trying to find a place to light. Or how many cars circumnavigate Honnold Library several times before parking over near 8th and College and walking blocks to their business on one of the campuses.

Part of the City response is to step up enforcement of parking time limitations. City Manager Jeff Parker, in a recent "City Manager Update", cheerily reports, "This past month [December] the new parking enforcement officer issued almost 600 parking tickets." ...And "Happy Holidays" to you, too.

We heard from a prominent Village businessman, "...and you have that Nazi [his word, not ours] handing out parking tickets to our customers like candy. I saw her write four in three minutes..."

We don't mind city government doing its part to relieve congestion; what we do mind is city government spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars--or maybe even millions of dollars--failing to do so; and that is what has happened.

Now we read (see page 2 of the link) that "It is anticipated that staff will be reviewing the possible implementation of residential permit parking in the following areas:

+Via Santa Catarina, Via Montevideo, and Highpoint Drive
+Streets adjacent to the Claremont Colleges
+Oberlin Avenue and Cornell Avenue, near the Village Expansion
The Courier reports that permit-only parking is also being considered for Claremont High School, The BC Cafe, and Baughman Avenue located south of Foothill.

Can there be any doubt that the problems at the Colleges, in the Village, and near the Village Expansion are the direct result of the failure of City leaders and City Staff adequately to plan for and require adequate convenient parking? And now that Claremont is practically covered with buildings, we have the ever-helpful Ginger Elliott, Claremont's Intermeddler-in-Chief, writing, "Underground parking should be encouraged in the in the institutional zones where the demand cannot now be met." Thanks.

We do hear, though, that Pomona College might gut Big Bridges and put a parking structure inside, keeping the exterior facade to evoke the idea of an auditorium rather than some dull-witted, sterile, academic support structure similar to the ones they've recently plopped down on Sixth Street.

We would be remiss to end this without commenting on the surprising inclusion of "Via Santa Catarina, Via Montevideo, and Highpoint Drive. Via Santa Cata-where?

It turns out this is the street at the top of Claraboya where Suzanne Thompson, Beverly Speak, and their Claremont Wildlands Conservancy friends have been parking for years to visit Johnson's Pasture. Much of the curb was painted red some years ago, but parking is still allowed in front of the residences. According to the Courier article, "On Via Santa Catarina, near the entrance to Johnson's Pasture, residents have complained about overcrowding and vandalism to their vehicles from people entering the park." We recall several years ago the City "plan" for Johnson's Pasture parking consisted of an anemic five or six diagonal spaces on the very stub end of Mountain Avenue next to the Highpoint Condos. To our knowledge the City has no firm plan to provide any parking adjacent to the $11.5 million Johnson's Pasture property, and when the City finally does, the residents will look back on this time as "the good old days" in terms of traffic, noise, and vandalism at all hours of the day and night. Just go on a "used condom" patrol of the upper streets in Claraboya some Monday morning if you don't believe us.

Where the City has caused parking problems, such as the Village, near the Colleges, or even up in Claraboya, it now plans to go not to the guilty, such as the Colleges or its own planning staff, but rather to punish the innocent: those who merely committed the excusable sin of driving their car on their errands.