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May 29, 2023

New parking plan for downtown Yakima would keep 2

Business Reporter More monthly permits, stepped-up enforcement and the retention

Business Reporter

More monthly permits, stepped-up enforcement and the retention of most free two-hour spaces are part of a downtown parking proposal presented to the Yakima City Council.

Last fall, city officials discussed – and a divided City Council approved – a new system of paid parking downtown to provide additional funding to repair and maintain five downtown parking lots.

Two months later, the council delayed implementation of the paid parking, giving business owners time to come up with an alternative plan to pay for downtown infrastructure improvements.

Downtown business and property owners Ben Hittle and Joe Mann presented their plan Tuesday night, proposing to increase from 30% to 60% the number of spaces in the five downtown parking lots reserved for monthly parking permits. The cost of those permits would also increase, from $40 to $50 per month.

Mann said this would create 260 spaces (out of the 429 spaces in the five city-owned lots) for monthly permit parking, and would leave the remaining 1,666 on-street and parking lot spaces for free, two-hour use by customers and other downtown visitors.

"It would be great if there could be free parking everywhere … but those lots need to be maintained, and it's expensive to maintain them, and we understand that," Mann said.

City council members asked Hittle, Mann and fellow downtown business owner Steve Mercy, who was not at Tuesday's meeting, to bring their plan before the Downtown Association of Yakima board of directors for a recommendation. Mann is president of the DAY board.

Paid parking downtown has ebbed and flowed over the past 40 to 50 years, as longtime business owner Mann and longtime Yakima resident and City Council member Patricia Byers noted.

Mann said when the five downtown parking lots were established by business owners in the 1970s, the goal was to create a downtown shopping district with free parking. But the availability has fluctuated.

Byers said in her 44 years living in Yakima, she's seen parking meters put in and taken out downtown several times.

"We’ve had our moments with parking meters and they’ve never worked out," she said.

Mann replied that he's been downtown for 48 years "and it seems every four or five years there's a new parking plan."

The latest resulted from a 2022 analysis of downtown parking in an area from Ninth Street to Fourth Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to Walnut Street. This study found heavy and steady use of parking lots and recommended that the city consider pay-to-park options, eliminate no-limit parking and use demand to set time limits.

In an October memo to the Yakima City Council, City Manager Bob Harrison recommended the city charge $1 per hour for parking between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. in the downtown area Mondays through Saturdays, with no charge on Sundays.

The recommendation would have installed parking stations, not individual meters, in lots and on streets where users would pay for parking. Harrison said the city would have a mobile pay option, so people could pay or extend their parking time using an app on their phones.

This proposal would have produced an estimated $1.3 million annually, although for the first five years, much of that revenue would go toward paying off the cost of the pay stations, leaving about $500,000 per year to begin resurfacing the lots and fixing sidewalks, Harrison said.

On Oct. 11, council members Eliana Macias, Danny Herrera, Soneya Lund and Mayor Janice Deccio voted to move ahead with paid downtown parking, with council members Byers, Matt Brown and Holly Cousens opposing the plan.

Two months later, after 10 business owners spoke in opposition to paid parking and other written comments were received against it, the council unanimously postponed the implementation of paid parking for six months as downtown business owners vowed to come up with an alternative plan.

Hittle and Mann told council members Tuesday that two main benefits of their plan is the continuation of free two-hour parking for downtown customers and the very low costs of implementing their proposed changes, especially compared to the installation of pay stations and mobile parking fee options.

"We wanted to do a simple approach … it isn't going to be super costly to put this system into effect," Mann said, noting costs would be limited to a few new signs.

He estimated the increased number and costs of monthly permits, revenue from those buying daily parking passes and fines from tickets on illegally-parked vehicles would generate between $231,000 to $256,000 in annual income for maintenance of the downtown parking lots.

Hittle said a renewed emphasis on enforcing downing parking rules was an important part of their plan, and Harrison noted that enforcement was suspended during the COVID pandemic.

But the lull in downtown parking enforcement is about to change, Harrison and Yakima Police Chief Matt Murray said, noting that there are five community service officers who have been trained for animal control and parking enforcement.

"They provide us with a much, much more robust ability to do enforcement (of downtown parking rules)," Murray said.

Mann said he had discussed the new plan with about 10 other downtown business owners. Most support the idea and some have expressed interest in splitting the cost of parking with their workers.

One of those employers is Jay Hirst, vice president of operations at Kittitas Interactive Management. During public comments, he said his company was willing to help pay for monthly parking permits for its employees who fill offices on multiple floors of the A.E. Larson Building.

Deccio, Lund and Cousens asked Mann and Hittle to seek an endorsement of their proposal from the DAY board before the council considers implementing it – although most council members expressed enthusiasm for their plan.

"I really appreciate you leaving in the free two-hour parking for patrons who come downtown. That's really important," Cousens said.

"I’d like to see the city move forward in some way with this plan or a version of this plan," Byers added.

Contact Joel Donofrio at [email protected].

Business Reporter

Joel Donofrio is the business reporter for the Yakima Herald. He was born and raised in the Chicago area, but he and his wife, Cathy, fell in love with the beauty (and low humidity) of the West and moved here in 2009, eventually relocating to Yakima in September 2021. They have two young adult children, Anthony and Joanna, and a dog, Molly. When he is not taking photos of construction sites, tracking down new and relocating businesses or catching up on agricultural trends, Joel enjoys playing guitar, singing, listening to music and playing and watching sports.

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