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Editorial
Now everyone's part of parking solution
The best thing that's happened in the long, bruising history of downtown parking is the coming together of business people and residents under the banner of the Downtown Parking Community Task Force. The name itself reveals why it was such a good move.
In the past, the attitude seemed to be that downtown parking was a merchant problem, not something residents needed to worry about--unless it was to complain about a proposed solution.
And much as merchants tried to solve the great parking conundrum, they often became part of the problem themselves--supporting paid parking as a revenue stream to pay for a parking garage, for instance, and then doing an about-face when push came to shove.
Parking became a resident problem big-time during the holiday season when shoppers spilled over into the Almond Grove neighborhood creating both congestion and parking headaches.
Now both the merchants and the residents have joined forces to become part of the solution. And the addition of resident participation seems to have revitalized the effort at the critical juncture when town officials and merchants have historically begun to get queasy--the point when the inevitable subject of paid parking can no longer be ignored.
Last week's presentation by the Aspen, Colo., parking administrator will go down in Los Gatos history as a first--the first time a discussion about paid parking ended on an upbeat note. That's because speaker Tom Ware wasn't leading a philosophical discussion. No one in the audience could seriously say, as has happened in the past, "Oh, the residents won't buy that," or "That's too inconvenient for the business community."
For Ware, it was a matter of "been there, done that." In fact, when the pay and display program first went into effect in Aspen, downtown employees were so angry that they staged a "honk-in" and burned a parking meter in effigy. A referendum a year later found 71 percent of Aspen's population approved of the program.
One of the real selling points of the pay and display system is that its flexibility is its own best argument against charges that paid parking would be inconvenient for visitors, employees and residents.
With the entire downtown community working together to find parking solutions, the Town Council seems more prepared than it's ever been to take action.
Neighborhood representative Tom Boyce summed it up very well when he said, "Everybody was probing to find the fatal flaw in this system, and they had worked through all those potential flaws and solved them."
There's still much to be done before the council can make a decision, but thanks to the cooperative efforts and the work of the downtown community, we're much farther along the road than seemed possible just a short time ago.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
