Parking woes eat up commissioners’ time

BY PRU SOWERS

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

Fixing the parking and traffic congestion problems in Key West has long been a difficult challenge. And apparently, it’s not getting any easier.

City Commissioners failed recently to find agreement on a relatively small issue of whether to allow parking on one block of Simonton Street, voting 3-3 to overturn a previous resolution that would allow vehicles to legally park in the 100 block of that major downtown thoroughfare. Because it was a tie vote – Mayor Craig Cates is on an extended vacation – the resolution failed.

As a result, city parking officials will go ahead with plans to install a pay station on the block. That should address local business owners’ complaints that cars have parked there without moving for days or longer at a time, leading to a congested street where vehicles have difficulty passing each other. The block had turned into a parking free-zone for months as construction on a new condominium development wound down and people saw that the block had no meters and no signs forbidding parking.

Key West Parking Director John Wilkins wanted to move ahead with the plan to meter the 16 or 17 available spots on the block, which he estimated would bring could bring in as much as $75,000 a year in parking revenue. To make his case to the commission, he prepared an elaborate computer presentation using slides and video to show that the 100 block of Simonton is as wide as Duval and Whitehead streets, which are also two-way and allow parking. The problem is a loading zone on the block that has drawn delivery trucks that stick out into the street. That loading area was supposed to be eliminated when the street was repainted but was not, Wilkins said.

“Unfortunately, we left [the loading zone] up. We should have removed it when the new sidewalks came in on the other side. But we didn’t,” he said.

A long discussion among commissioners ensued, with talk back and forth on whether the Simonton 100 block parking plan should be scrapped until a new plan could be devised. Commissioners Sam Kaufman, Jimmy Weekley and Margaret Romero voted no, saying adding paid parking to the block should not be delayed.

“I circled for 40 minutes yesterday roughly at 2 pm,” Romero said. “Forty minutes and I couldn’t find a spot. And I even had my little [city] commissioner badge. The parking downtown is atrocious.”

If a parking issue involving a single block in the downtown area receives so much attention and debate, some are wondering how commissioners will deal with the long list of parking and traffic recommendations that will soon come before them from the Parking and Alternative Transportation Group (PAT). Formed last August and given six months to recommend solutions to traffic congestion and the lack of available parking, the group recently ended its assignment, making 25 recommendations that commissioners will decide whether or not to implement. Some are extensive, ranging from new delivery truck routes to adding more residential parking, better enforcement, pursuing alternate and sustainable modes of transport, purchasing more bike racks, and reducing the 30-minute unloading zones outside guest houses to 15 minutes, with those spaces transforming into residential parking from 8 pm-8 am. PAT also voted to recommend that the current $3 an hour parking rate – higher in some areas – increase to $4 an hour across the board.

Some of the proposed recommendations are likely to produce culture shock to both residents and tourists alike. For example, one of the proposals from the PAT group would boost the number of residential-only parking spaces in Old Town neighborhoods by reserving 50 percent of the spaces per block for residents and increasing to 75 percent in a two-block radius around city-owned parking lots in Old Town. But that plan could impact tourists and local business employees who live outside of Key West and drive in for work, Kaufman said.

“How can we shift the availability to our tourists or visitors and our locals as opposed to people going to work? It makes little sense to eat up all these spots all day long by an employee,” he said.

Fasten your seatbelts. It may be a bumpy night as commissioners debate PAT’s recommendations.

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