PROVO -- At tonight's meeting, the Provo Municipal Council will hear a strange request from a neighborhood chairman; he'll be asking the council to throw out a proposal to regulate parking in his neighborhood.
Joaquin neighborhood chairman Kurt Peterson said the proposal will be back, but he felt like some recommendations from the city's planning department needed more consideration than he or any of the neighbors could provide now.
"It's really just a matter of convenience," he said.
When they've looked at other options, and maybe after the election season, the proposal will be back, he said.
While that doesn't resolve any parking congestion issues, it also doesn't present new challenges for people in the neighborhood.
Debra Twitchell, who lives on 600 East, doesn't think the permit program will resolve the real problem. Students park on the street and walk to school, which jams up the streets for everybody else. They need to pay for parking and park where appropriate, not up and down the street, she said.
"There's enough neighbors around here that park on the street," she said.
Twitchell also didn't think making people who live there pay to park in front of their homes was fair. Another woman down the street said although plenty of students live in the neighborhood, she doesn't really see a parking problem.
"Sometimes on Friday and Saturday night they'll be having a lot of guests over, but that's the only time," said Dalene Anderson, who has lived in the south Joaquin neighborhood for several years.
The city allows neighborhoods to petition for these programs, which require cars parked on the street overnight to have a permit. The idea is that the people who live there will have access to the permits, while the people who don't live there won't be able to leave their cars on the street and block others from parking in front of their own houses.
Two neighborhoods have an active permit program, and North Joaquin has a program that was initially scheduled to be implemented on Sept. 1. When the Joaquin Village, a large, planned multi-use student housing development stalled with the economy, that program followed suit. It is still in place, but at the July 21 Municipal Council meeting the council voted to hold off on implementation for at least two years.
Peterson is mostly satisfied with that decision, although he said parking is a problem now, even without the major development that inspired the parking permit program. People seem to be waiting for that big project, whatever it may be, and when it happens it will force the neighborhood over the parking edge, he said.
"That's going to happen, and it's going to happen pretty soon," Peterson said, adding several developers have called to talk to him about property in the neighborhood that they own. "Some might think it's just that Joaquin Village project, but it's not."
Utah Valley University student Courtney Twiet lives across the street from the fenced-off field of weeds that was supposed to be the thriving Joaquin Village by now, and just a few blocks from Brigham Young University. She likes to park in the street, she said, but their house has plenty of off-street parking in the back for all the tenants.
"There's a lot of cars on the street during the school year," she said, adding that the streets west of them, that have more apartment complexes, have a bigger problem. "I think parking everywhere in Utah is the worst."
This happens, Peterson said, because many landlords simply do not provide sufficient parking for their tenants. The city does not require a one-to-one ratio of beds to parking spaces, and landlords bank on the fact that not all students drive cars. But the number who do is much larger than the number who did a few decades ago, and landlords need to reconsider today's situation, Peterson said.
"Things change," he said.
• Heidi Toth can be reached at (801) 344-2556 or htoth@heraldextra.com.
Posted in Provo on Tuesday, August 18, 2009 12:00 am Updated: 3:13 pm. | Tags: Provo, Joaquin Neighborhood, Kurt Peterson, Brigham Young University
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