By Leslie Wolf Branscomb

Lack of adequate parking has long bedeviled Hillcrest, and solutions have been scant.
Plans for a parking garage were discarded because of the cost, diagonal parking is opposed by residents who fear excess traffic near their homes, and more than a few people really hate the plan for new high-tech parking meters .
Now there’s a proposal to alleviate Hillcrest’s parking woes by utilizing the lot at the yet-to-be-built Hillcrest/Mission Hills branch library. At an Aug. 6 Uptown Partnership meeting the board considered – but did not vote on – a proposal to give $1 million to the library project, with the understanding that that the 90-space underground parking lot could be used by the public as well as library patrons.
The site, on the southwest corner of Washington and Front streets, now contains a rundown vacant building, with a parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence and peppered with graffiti and trash. The building, which once housed the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, was purchased by the city in 2003. The plan is to raze it and construct a 25,000-square-foot facility to replace the existing Mission Hills library on W. Washington Street a few blocks away.
The Friends of the Library Web site puts the library’s completion date at “late 2007/early 2008.” However, a city report on the Fiscal Year 2010 proposed budget, issued April 28, says the libraries planned for Mission Hills, North Park and San Carlos “lack sufficient funding for construction and ongoing operational costs.”
Jay Hill, executive director of the San Diego Public Library Foundation, admitted at the August Uptown Partnership meeting that the project isn’t yet fully-funded. But Hill was optimistic. “We have a lot of momentum on this project,” he said, while displaying architectural renderings of the proposed building. “It obviously would increase the parking capacity of the neighborhood.”
Tony Manolatos, spokesman for 2nd District City Councilman Kevin Faulconer, was more direct. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “Two people have pledged $5 million apiece. They need $20 million, so they’re only halfway to their goal.”
“It’s years away,” he said. “There’s no guarantee the new one’s going to be built.”
But the possibility that a new library may not be built for a long time, if ever, hasn’t deterred the Uptown Partnership’s Executive Director Carol Schultz from considering it a viable parking alternative. “We know it will be several years before we break ground on the library,” Shultz said. “In the interim we are working with the city to see if we can open up that parking lot to the public. There are about 40 spaces that could be used.”
The site is across the street from Sushi Deli, a bar and a gutted Jack in the Box, but three blocks from the far western end of the heavily-traveled mile-long swath of University Avenue that contains most of the area’s shops, restaurants and bars.
Schultz said she didn’t know whether people would be willing to walk that far for parking, but added that the future development should be taken into consideration. “Any time you’re looking at this type of investment in the community you also have to think of the future,” she said. “I think we have to look at it in terms of what’s to come.”
Crest Café owner Cecelia Moreno scoffed at that idea. “The businesses need the parking now, and they’ve needed it since 1997,” she said. “The future is now.”
“Why would the partnership need to drop a dime toward building that library?” Moreno asked. “Their function is not to build libraries.”
The Uptown Partnership was formed in 1997, and its purpose is to invest in and manage public parking resources for the benefit of the community, in collaboration with local neighborhoods, according to its Web site. Its funding comes from parking meter revenues in Uptown.
There have been frequent clashes between the partnership and Hillcrest business owners, who question how the money is being spent.
The library funding proposal came about after it was discovered that planned new parking meters would cost less than expected. The $1 million budget reallocation recommendation was placed on the Aug. 6 board meeting agenda, to the surprise of some.
Tim Gahagan, treasurer of the Hillcrest Town Council, said it was his understanding that the Uptown Partnership had promised the city council they would seek public input before deciding how to spend the extra $1 million. “We were pretty shocked when we saw on the August agenda that they were going to vote on it,” he said. “It doesn’t look like there’s much of a public process occurring.”
Gahagan and others who attended the meeting asked the board to postpone voting on the allocation, which they did. It may not come up for a vote again until November at the earliest, said Schultz, after three new board members are seated.