[From: Daily Pilot] City Considers paid parking in South Laguna

Residents of South Laguna Beach had their voices heard last month during a town hall meeting to consider solutions to parking in the city, which can get crammed with visitors.

City staff presented plans during the Aug. 27 meeting for public parking rates for the next five years and the potential for additional paid parking in South Laguna, as well as future work to be done at the Aliso Beach parking lot.

Laguna Beach’s current five-year coastal development permit has allowed the city to raise its parking rates by 10% per year during the popular summer season, when its art festivals are also in session.

That has seen the hourly rate for a spot in the downtown area go from $4.50 to $6.45 in the past five years, while other paid parking spots have seen increases from $2.50 to $3.60.

Alexis Braun, acting director of transit and community services, said the city plans to seek a continuation of the 10% year-over-year increase in parking rates during the summer for the next five years. If successful, the city would be able to charge $10.20 per hour for a downtown spot and as much as $5.85 for other spaces by the summer of 2030.

City officials maintain the city provides free and affordable parking options with the ability to connect to destinations throughout town via its public transit offerings, including the Laguna Local on-demand ride program and the trolley service.

“If we’re going to continue to offer all this free transit, which is a good thing because it moves people around town, we have to look at increasing parking revenues because that is the revenue source,” Councilman Bob Whalen said Friday in a phone interview. “That allows us to run the free public transit, lease the spots at [Mission] Hospital so there’s low-cost — or in some cases, no-cost — parking for people to use and then hop on the trolley or the Laguna Beach Local. We will definitely be including that as part of the rationale for our rates.”

Braun presented a South Laguna paid parking proposal that could result in the addition of 593 spaces along South Coast Highway. The plan, which would require Caltrans approval of an encroachment permit, could net about 361 inland spaces and 232 coastal spaces between Moss Street and Vista Del Sol.

Visitor parking in the neighborhoods has long been a sore subject among residents. A crowd of about 50 people shared stories during the two-hour town hall of nuisance behaviors and offered ideas of how to fix the problems.

As a microphone made its way around the room, a number of anecdotes spoke to inconveniences such as being unable to park in front of one’s own home or having residential trash cans filled by visitors to the city.

“We’ve got to find a way that says ‘This is how many parking spaces there are, this is the only number of cars that can come,’” said a man who identified himself as a South Laguna resident. “That is not restricting access. That’s matching access to infrastructure.”

Some argued it is unsafe on multiple levels, with cars racing past, to find an empty parking spot before it is taken. One speaker noted that some motorists park illegally in front of white fire hydrants.

“We’re basically self-selecting the people who want to come here for free because we let it be free,” resident Aaron Peluso said. “We really need to be addressing this, and we need to get away from building parking spaces, I think, anywhere in the city, whether it’s Aliso, whether it’s the hospital, … or anywhere else. We need to monetize the stuff that’s right here in front of us.

“If we cannot exclude people from the residential areas in terms of parking, then we need to charge them to be there. We don’t need to be adding additional parking elsewhere so that we get the worst of all worlds.”

While a show of hands at the meeting indicated most of the attendees would be willing to explore paid parking, to some extent, within the neighborhoods, there was resident pushback against adding more spaces to the Aliso Beach parking lot.

“You’ve given us something to rethink,” City Manager Dave Kiff said, referring to the Aliso Beach lot. “I don’t want to build a bunch of space that nobody’s going to use.”

Toward the end of the meeting, a member of the audience requested a summation of the points made by people in the room. The resident feedback was gathered to help prepare a staff report in advance of the Sept. 23 City Council meeting, when the panel will be asked to give general direction for the next five-year coastal development permit dictating parking rates.

“I’m really concerned about the points that people made about emergency access and access to fire hydrants,” Kiff said. “I did hear an openness to a pay station model, certainly for Coast Highway, and then maybe for a couple of blocks for the residential streets, so you may see that proposed. I didn’t see people hating on that, with the caveat that we have to square away what residents have to do.”