By Clarence Cromwell
Los Gatos should let Walgreen's and 18 other stores north of Highway 9 pay the town to forgive their shortage of parking spaces and lift the ban on improving their properties, Planning Commissioners recommended Aug. 28.
The parking fees will be voluntary and won't present the problems that dogged parking districts on the other side of Highway 9, Planning Director Lee Bowman said.
But the program could make some merchants choose between paying thousands for parking credits they probably don't need or letting their shops deteriorate.
Walgreen's wants to make the N. Santa Cruz Avenue store more accessible to handicapped patrons, enlarge the pharmacy inside and give the building a facelift. The size of the building will not change.
Walgreen's cannot do any work on the store now because it's eight parking spaces short, according to a zoning ordinance that forbids any improvements on properties with insufficient parking.
Walgreen's couldn't remodel until now because its landlord lacks additional property to build parking spaces, and the town lacked a program to sell parking credits--a license to let the store's patrons use town-owned spaces in that neighborhood rather than the store's lot.
Walgreen's asked the town to start the program so it can buy eight credits and rely on parking spaces at the town-owned Park and Ride lot next door, rather than build new parking.
A change to the Town Code that the Planning Commission considered Aug. 28 would strike out the ban on remodeling. If the Town Council accepts it, Director of Building and Engineering Scott Baker will draw up a plan to sell Walgreen's and any other stores parking credits.
The town staff calculated in 1990 that they could sell credits in the area north of Highway 9 for $1,574 per parking space, about what it cost to build the Park and Ride lot. If that rate were adopted, Walgreen's would have to pay $12,592.
Owners of the 19 properties need a total of 184 spaces.
If the parking program is adopted, businesses won't be able to stock up on parking credits for later expansion as some did in the downtown parking district set up in 1980. The town also will not sell more spaces than it owns in the area north of Highway 9, Bowman said.
The downtown parking crunch resulting from those two practices led merchants to joke that they'd bought "phantom parking spaces."
Bowman calls the program voluntary--shops with insufficient parking are not required to buy credits, but if they don't, they cannot remodel stores or add any improvements that increase the value of the building.
The town's parking formulas, however, may not reflect what merchants actually need.
Town building and planning officials calculate how many spaces a store needs by the number of square feet in the building. Bowman conceded that the formula isn't always in the right ballpark. The formulas yield an ideal number for a relatively busy store.
An aggressive business that wants to draw a lot of customers might need more spaces than the town requires, Bowman said.
But a business that isn't very competitive or one that doesn't require large numbers of customers to come through the door--such as a tea shop--won't need as much parking as the formulas say. Still, the parking must be built in case a more robust business moves in someday.
In fact, Los Gatos Shopping Center, where Walgreen's stands, is a good example of the formula's imperfection.
According to a 1990 report, the 170-space shopping center parking lot is short a total of 48 parking spaces. But there's plenty of parking.
An unscientific survey showed that the Los Gatos shopping center lots were never more than 48 percent full--although the town says parking is insufficient.
A reporter counted cars in the lot during two time periods--8 a.m. to noon and noon to 6 p.m. last Wednesday and Thursday. The first two rows in front of Walgreens tend to fill up while the rest of the lot is moderately used.
Downtown lots, on the other hand, averaged 74 percent full in the mornings and 94 percent full during evenings, according to the 1995 survey. Some downtown lots reach more than 100 percent of their capacity because of double-parked drivers.
The Park and Ride lot adjacent to Walgreen's is unusually empty for a town parking lot.
It's never more than 20 percent full, according to the town's 1995 traffic study, even though most town lots are 90 percent full at peak hours. If somebody picked up the 19-or-so cars clustered in the Park and Ride Lot behind the shopping center and moved them into the Los Gatos Shopping Center parking lot, the lot would still be only about 59 percent full.
Nevertheless, Bowman said the town uses parking formulas that are nationally accepted and are used by numerous other cities.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, September 4, 1996.
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