Free parking may end in downtown Healdsburg

Free parking in Healdsburg, a vestige of the days before tourists flocked to the Wine Country hub, could be coming to an end.

In an effort to create more turnover of parking spots around the popular Healdsburg Plaza, City Council members Tuesday agreed to pursue a consultant’s recommendation to charge for on-street parking - at least in some downtown blocks.

The recommendations of a new study call for, as part of a pilot program, on-street paid parking on streets suffering from the lowest parking availability.

“Everyone wants to park in the core. For one reason or another they feel almost an entitlement to park there. There’s only a small amount of space available,” is how Mayor Shaun McCaffrey summed up the predicament.

He predicted a paid parking and license plate recognition program to help enforce it “will make some people very angry.”

But there is also something that could make it more palatable, at least for local residents, who would be exempted from having to pay for the first three hours of parking, according to the recommendation.

“We need free time for residents,” said Councilman Tom Chambers, reflecting the council consensus.

The comments came during a joint meeting of the City Council and Planning Commission on Tuesday to consider the study by Walker Parking Consultants.

The council took no vote, but agreed to continue to weigh parking issues at meetings yet to be scheduled.

Councilman Eric Ziedrich said it was a complex issue. “We can’t come up with a semblance of an answer until there’s a lot more vetting and public hearings,” he said.

Healdsburg used to have downtown parking meters, but did away with them in the late 1960s, or early 1970s, according to Councilman Gary Plass. He said they were antiquated and didn’t collect that much money.

But more than four decades later, the difficulty of finding parking in an around the Plaza, with its concentration of restaurants, wine tasting rooms and trendy stores, has made city officials reconsider.

Consultants say there isn’t so much a shortage of parking downtown as an imbalance of parking demand. A big part of the problem is that downtown employees tend to take up a number of prime spaces.

They said much of the on-street parking within two blocks of the Plaza is effectively unavailable during the middle of the day.

During the weekday peak, about 22 percent of cars were parked in short-term parking for more than the four-hour maximum, meaning that despite posted time limits and enforcement, long-term parkers are occupying a significant number of spaces designated for visitors and customers.

But at the same time, the study said there is no shortage of spaces that might be a little farther away.

During the weekday peak, more than 700 public and private parking spaces were sitting vacant.

The study acknowledged the need to reduce the abuse of time limits by long-term parkers, but enforcement has been notoriously difficult. The current city ordinance allows long-term parkers to move their cars and return making time-limit enforcement even more challenging.

The study calls for pay-by-plate multispace kiosks to reduce clutter on the sidewalk and minimize costs to the city. There would be a pay-by-cellphone option allowing parkers to bypass the parking meter and also add time up to the three-hour limit.

Healdsburg residents would either have to register to get the free parking downtown, or there may be software available to automatically identify Healdsburg license plates through DMV records.

Consultants said any parking enforcement should be customer friendly rather than punitive. They suggested eliminating the charge for first offenses, but then levying progressively higher fines for habitual parking offenders.

One concern is that charging for parking could push people to park in the residential neighborhood just east of downtown. City officials said some sort of vehicle sticker program to allow only residential parking might be necessary.

The analysis did not find sufficient demand to justify a parking garage.

“Further, a number of stakeholders expressed a preference for encouraging people to park in peripheral locations and walk into downtown as well as a less auto-centric downtown overall,” stated the authors of the study.

In an effort to provide long-term parkers alternatives to parking in the most popular locations downtown, the study recommends increasing the number of parking spaces by approximately 62 spaces in the West Plaza and Purity parking lots.

Another recommendation is to increase use of underutilized privately owned parking spaces through a public parking agreement with the owners of the private lots.

You can reach Staff Writer Clark Mason at 521-5214 or clark.mason@pressde?mocrat.com. On Twitter ?@clarkmas.