COM 0267.006 2006-2008 - Laserfiche WebLink

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ALAMEDA: Okay. Commissioners, any questions regarding the recommendation made by the Department or for Mr. Darrow? Seeing none, Mr. Kurokawa, do you have anything else to add? KUROKAWA: Yes, I just wanted to ALAMEDA: Sure. KUROKAWA: You know, in general our concerns for the bill, we're trying to address the concerns that were initiated by Councilman Ford, which is I think in the Kona areas they have a lot of areas with certain types of uses, restaurants, multi-family condominiums where not enough parking so people are parking on the street. With the traffic congestion, you know, things get even little harry. So what we did in response to that is to kind of look at current recommended standards, urban planning standards, and made some adjustments to our current Code, but not to all of her suggestions and recommendations, and came back with our recommendation. And, also, one of the other key areas that we're concerned about is non-conforming use if we change the parking ratios. And so we've inserted a recommendation in terms of how to deal with that so that when someone has, say, if their building burns down and have to rebuild that they would be able to do so, and then with conditions for adding additional parking if they're able to. So those are the major areas. And then in general what we're trying to do is, you know, this kind of balancing act between you add more parking, change the ratios on a blanket-wide basis. It affects the whole island. And it's kind of in contradiction to what we're trying to do which is reduce the auto dependency and also to encourage people to walk and bike, and those types of things. So, in conjunction, recognizing that we still have a lot of these things to put into place, we still did not want to, you know, go the route of encouraging, in essence, by increasing some of the parking ratios. ALAMEDA: Commissioner Siracusa? SIRACUSA: One of the comment letters that we got from an architect or landscape architect was that we were basically encouraging the use of more large vehicles, like the supersized SUVs and stuff like that as opposed to encouraging compact cars which would take up less space in a parking area and that sort of thing, that this bill would do that and encourage more automobile dependency. KUROKAWA: Right. SIRACUSA: Would you address that concern, please. KUROKAWA: Yeah, so currently we have, you know, our current Code allows for two- thirds, 66 percent, standard size parking and the remainder, you know, third in compacts. So we have actually kept that because I think the proposal was to do 100 percent standard parking. And you know, from again, from trying to encourage the smaller cars as well as have less impervious surfaces would be supported by what we currently have; and so we kept that, kept it in. 2