By Dave Schwab

Uptown is at a crossroads in parking management.
Depending on who you consult, the community is either heading in the right direction – or taking a wrong turn.
Concerning parking, there is a difference between perception and reality, said Carol Schultz, executive director of Uptown Partnership, the community-based, nonprofit corporation that funds parking, traffic and pedestrian improvements with a percentage of revenues collected by the city from Uptown parking meters.

“If we perceive a parking problem, there’s a parking problem,” Schultz said. “The misperception might be that there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Uptown Partnership has spent more than $2.5 million since 1999 to upgrade parking in Hillcrest. Recently, it allocated an estimated $600,000 to $700,000 – which is 45 percent of the cost – to replace Uptown’s 1,368 meters, with installation starting this fiscal year on July 1 and likely occurring over the next four years, Schultz said. The City of San Diego will pay the remaining 55 percent of the cost of the new meters.

All city meters are to be replaced with multi-space pay stations or single-head meters linked to a web-based information system providing real-time usage data, which allows flexible rate structures and time limits while tracking revenues. None of these features is available with the current meters. The new solar-powered meters will accept credit cards as well as coins.

The City of San Diego established its Community Parking District program in 1997 as part of a strategy to invest in older neighborhood commercial districts and provide parking-impacted communities with a way to devise and implement parking management solutions to meet their specific needs. Uptown Partnership administers the community parking district that extends from Park Boulevard on the east to Interstate 5 on the west, and from Mission Valley south to Elm Street. The parking district is funded by a 45 percent share of parking meter revenues in the district, which amounted to approximately $850,000 in the last fiscal year, said Schultz. She added that Uptown Partnership is voluntarily participating in the city’s meter utilization plan, backed by the mayor, because the group feels it’s the right way to go in parking management.
However, not everyone in the community is on board with Uptown Partnership’s ambitious meter-replacement plan. Cecelia Moreno, owner of Crest Café on Robinson Avenue, believes Uptown Partnership’s stewardship of the parking situation has gotten sidetracked. “The mission of the community parking district is to procure more parking for the benefit of residents and businesses,” she said. “They have not fulfilled that mission.”
Moreno is “vehemently opposed” to Uptown’s intent to follow the city’s plan to replace the old gray metal meters in Uptown with high-tech new ones. “We need to have an entity within the community that we can trust to make the right decision, instead of just doing what the mayor needs them to do,” she said. “I have a problem with expending reserve funds for new-technology meters. If the city of San Diego wants to put in new-tech meters, they should pay for it, not take it out of parking district money which is our money: tax dollars.”
Schultz defended the city’s parking meter utilization plan and the partnership’s desire to participate in it. “The plan is going to promote turnover in existing parking spaces,” she said, “and the new meter technology is going to use credit cards and relieve the pressure on high-demand areas.”
The city’s plan for meter utilization is being modified in response to comments at a city council hearing held in March. Assuming the council adopts a plan that allows parking districts to vary meter rates and time limits, the Uptown Partnership board has stated publicly that it will focus on lowering meter rates at under-utilized meters as a means of relieving pressure to park in high-demand areas.
Schultz said a downtown pilot program found that lowering parking meter rates and extending their time limits led to higher use of under-utilized meters. “One thrust of the program is to tailor just an area of a few blocks to local conditions,” she said. “We’ve not done a (parking) pilot in Uptown, but it stands to reason the toolbox they’ve been using in downtown would be useful in Uptown.”
Presently the city has one parking rate, $1.25 an hour, and a two-hour meter time limit. “I think the downtown pilot showed us the usefulness of being able to vary that on a neighborhood level,” said Schultz.
Moreno disagreed with comparing Uptown’s parking situation to downtown. “We don’t want to be lumped in with downtown,” she said. “We think our parking needs are inherently different and unique.”
“I am competing with the resurgence of North Park and they don’t have meters,” said Moreno. “So I think this is a horrible time to be expending that (new meter) money, which doesn’t add new parking. I have a problem with the mayor’s proposal in that the decision-making entity is the community parking district, of which I have no confidence. We have asked the mayor and city council to remove Uptown from any parking utilization plan until we have a community parking district that is responsive to their mission and to the community.”
Moreno also objects to the composition of the partnership’s nine-member volunteer board, only one of whom, she said, has a storefront business in Uptown. She also doesn’t like it that the board’s current bylaws allow members to serve in perpetuity. “I would like to see a complete revamping of the Uptown Partnership so it’s no longer an insular board content to nominate and elect themselves,” she said.
Moreno would also like to see the partnership board increased to 15 members. And she feels they need to do a more a proactive job of selling themselves to the community. “People don’t even know that they exist,” she said.
Schultz disagreed with Moreno’s take on the partnership’s board. “The board of directors has been very active,” she said. “For the first eight or nine years, everyone thought the best way of addressing the issue was to build a parking structure in Hillcrest.”
Schultz said the partnership board looked at half a dozen prospective properties for parking structures over the years, but none of them panned out. They don’t pencil out either. “Our board has determined it isn’t financially feasible any longer to go ahead with the idea of constructing a parking garage,” said Schultz. “The revenues coming into the parking district for Uptown are nowhere near what is required to construct a parking garage.”
Instead, Schultz said, the partnership board has determined the wiser course is to manage existing parking spaces by replacing parallel spaces with angled spaces.
Moreno suggested one solution to finding more parking that doesn’t involve installing costly new meters: “We need some parking lots,” she said, “not fancy garages like North Park. Parking districts should be creative about how they add parking spaces to an urban area and they haven’t done that, just had studies and paid consultants. It’s a boondoggle, an abject failure – real discouraging.”
Schultz is optimistic that Uptown Partnership is doing the right things and that the mayor’s meter implementation plan is the right way to go. “The plan has the ability to tailor things to local conditions,” she said, “and I would envision working at the neighborhood level, with the partnership board and staff taking advice from the neighborhood as to what their conditions are, and what they would like to see happening, propose some changes that would help alleviate the situation.”

Dave Schwab has been a journalist in San Diego County for more than 20 years and has worked on several publications including the San Diego Business Journal and the La Jolla Light. He resides in North Park. His e-mail is: [email protected].