City looking for input from shoppers, business owners,
landlords
and residents
Gilroy – Business owners, shoppers and others with a stake in downtown Gilroy can speak out on whether they prefer meters or painted curbs and signs as a cure for long-term parking headaches.

Officials will hold a public forum Wednesday to gather feedback on how to keep prime spots along the Monterey Street corridor open for paying customers. The meeting, part of a broader downtown parking management study, comes just weeks after life began returning to the area following a six-month construction closure.

The city reopened the street to motorists last month and complaints are already resurfacing about prime parking spots being monopolized by local workers, rather than those who show up to spend money.

“There really are three broad scenarios possible,” City Transportation Engineer Don Dey said. “One, do nothing, which is what we’re doing right now. Second, is to go with some type of timed limits like two hours. Or third, the parking meters, which are to a great extent self-enforcing, but does require a certain amount of enforcement to make sure people pay for the parking.”

Striped curbs or a string of metal poles with meters are far from the only options available to the city, Dey said. Nowadays, cities have technology that automatically alerts police departments if a vehicle has stayed beyond the time limits, while metering has shifted from a pole at every spot to a centrally-located meter machine that allows shoppers to pre-pay for a ticket that they then place on the dashboard. The solutions are a leap forward from traditional enforcement practices, Dey said.

“If you go back to the old chalk-the-tire enforcement, that’s a very labor-intensive type of method,” Dey said.

Whatever the final solution, some type of police officer or meter enforcement will ultimately be necessary. And when it comes to ticketing, meters tend to finance the cost of enforcement better than time restrictions.

“With parking meters, it would be a much more regular and sustainable revenue source that I think the city could do a good job of estimating year to year,” said Mike Waller, project manager with Hexagon Transportation Consultants, the Gilroy company hired to do the parking study. “In all likelihood, (meters) would pay for the enforcement costs and would probably generate a revenue surplus that could be turned over to the Downtown Business Association for additional streetscape improvements or for maintenance costs.”

But before any final decisions are made, the city is asking business owners, landlords, residents and shoppers for feedback on the best long-term solution.

“The whole idea of this parking management plan is to make sure that spaces that are most convenient for customer use are available for customers,” Waller said. “The idea is not to have all of the downtown employees taking up the customer spaces. We’re looking for the gentlest level of encouragement to try and create a customer-friendly parking experience.”

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