2007-08-31 TCOUNCIL-PARKING - Laserfiche WebLink

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So there will be a certain number of parking stalls required, for example, for a multi-family building. The County Council-initiated amendments to the Zoning Code would increase the number of required off-street parking stalls for various categories; and that’s Bill 79 that’s in front of you. And in some respects these very greatly increase the number of stalls that are required. The Department took a look at this, and agrees to some extent that some of the off- street parking requirements in the current Zoning Code are too little, but disagrees with some of the changes as far as the extent of those changes. To talk about the points of disagreement for the moment, under the current parking requirements for a retail commercial building, you need one stall per 300 square feet of gross retail floor space. The Council bill would require one per 100 square feet of retail space, which is about the tripling of the current requirements. To give a ballpark idea, many of the big box establishments like the Hilo Wal-Mart have one to 200, if you have an idea of that. And many commercial establishments in recent years have put in more parking than is required by the Zoning Code, simply because of their own analysis of their needs. So the Council bill would, for example, require, say the Hilo Wal-Mart parking lot to be roughly twice the size that it is. What the Planning Department’s bill suggests is that the requirement for restaurants be increased to one to 100 square feet. There have been some problems with restaurants, and if you look at the – we refer to national parking standards that do have more parking requirements for restaurants because of higher turnover – and if you think about the seating in a typical restaurant versus the density of people in a typical retail establishment, you have a lot more people per square foot typically. So we are proposing one to 100 square feet for the category of restaurants. Multi-family buildings, the current Code requires 1¼ parking stalls per unit for a multi-family building. We agree that this is unrealistic in today’s world. Many of the buildings that have been built in the last few years have provided more. We think that a good number would be 2 plus 10 percent for other guests and loading-type spaces. The Council bill is 2½. There are also changes that both bills propose for hotels. This was heard a couple of weeks ago. We looked at it, and made a couple of slight changes that for duplexes that there be two per unit with 10 percent additional guest parking, rather than 2.5. This would be the same as our recommendation for multi-family units, leaving the requirement for rooming and lodging houses at one per two beds, rather than one per one which is in our last draft. And then there had been a provision included in our recommendation at the last meeting that was not actually put in our version of the ordinance; and that recommendation was a way to handle nonconforming buildings. This becomes an important issue with something like parking because if you increase the number of required parking spaces, say an existing apartment building, for example, that had the minimum number of spaces or less than the new requirement becomes a nonconforming building. This is fine as long as the building is there. But if the building burns down or is destroyed in a hurricane or something, then it has to be built to the new standards. This can cause problems for things like the insurability and for insurance payments on a building. And our recommendation to avoid hardship is simply to say that a building that’s made nonconforming because of changes in the parking requirements can still be rebuilt to the same footprint that was before. EXHIBIT E 2