PORT ANGELES – Port Angeles City Councilman Mike French is expected to propose an ordinance tonight that would repeal current requirements that force new businesses and home builders to provide a minimum number of off-street parking spaces for their buildings.

For someone building a home, that could be a big money-saver and space-saver because you wouldn’t be forced to build a garage or a driveway if you’re allowed to park your vehicles on the street.

Downtown, you could build a business and not have to provide any parking for your customers. Councilman French says his motivation is to encourage more development.

“What we have now is a really inflexible government-led, you know top-down kind of view of, ‘this is exactly how much parking you need as a minimum’. It’s preventing businesses from doing the same kinds of expansions that they want to, and we have specific examples that we’ve seen both in larger developments and smaller ones. And the second part of that is that as we’re dealing with storm water regulations that the state and the federal government is putting on us, at the same time, the requirements are very stringent. And the more pavement we put down, the more stringent those requirements get. So often our city is telling developers, ‘you need to now put in these big parking lots, and then have to comply with regulations that you might not otherwise have had to worry about’. So, you know, I kind of view this as, we’ve had, in my mind, what’s bad code on the books for a long time and we need to fix it. And you know, I just see this as kind of low hanging fruit as far as, we have these rules that prevent development from happening and at the same time we complain that development’s not happening in the city of Port Angeles. And so at some point we need to look at our own code and say ‘hey, what are the things that we are putting in the way that could prevent development from penciling out?’. Because it’s expensive to build in 2019. So I’m just trying to make it a little cheaper.

We asked French to address in advance the inevitable outcry he’s going to hear from those who say there is already too little parking downtown.

“People often get very defensive about their parking, and I understand that. They want to have access to places they want to go and I don’t want to take that away from them. What I do think is we don’t help by providing exclusively free off-street parking. Part of that is an enforcement problem where, you know, people will come and park downtown for eight hours. So they’re not paying for that. If there was a price that they had to pay for some of that parking, not all of it, but some of it, they would probably make different choices, and some of those parking spots will be open more often. Because, you know, when a lot of people say there’s not enough parking downtown, sometimes what they mean is there’s not a parking immediately where I want it, and I’m not willing to walk a block or two. But long term I think we need to have some of those parking spots, you know, charged for, and have find an enforcement system that works so that people can make choices about where they want to park that makes more sense. So the people that want really close parking spots, they can pay five bucks or two bucks or whatever it might be. People that don’t care, they can park two or three blocks away and walk and they have their free parking spot. So I think that that’s part of the problem, that we’re not managing our parking as well as we could.”

Members of the public will have the opportunity to comment at tonight’s council meeting, which starts at 6:00.

At a minimum, a second reading of the proposal would have to take place before there would be a vote by the Council. That would happen in two weeks at the earliest.

You can read the proposed ordinance by clicking here.

Photo: Councilman Mike French