San Bruno to get metered parking

“It is really difficult to find parking there and while the parking is restricted to two hours, it has been difficult to enforce,” said Councilmember Tom Hamilton. “And a vibrant downtown needs parking turnover.”

The downtown already has a posted two-hour restricted parking enforced by the city’s Police Department. However, a lawsuit in San Francisco in 2021 over chalking tires has made it more difficult for the city to regulate parking and the Police Chief Ryan Johansen said the city should invest in automated license plate readers.

“It would be a good alternative to chalking,” Johansen said adding, he believes ALPR is a more efficient system that will better assist LAZ.

The city will install the parking meter kiosks in the business district on San Mateo Avenue, along El Camino Real from Kains Avenue to Crystal Springs Road and portions of Huntington Avenue and Angus, the streets surrounding the Artichoke Joe’s Casino building.

“These areas are already parking enforced so we are not really changing our posture, we are just changing the mechanism where people will pay to park and it will be enforced using ALPR technology,” Johansen said.

Kiosks will be strategically placed so people won’t have to walk too far to pay, he added.

The kiosks are designed to accept payments through coin, credit card and a payment app to pay by phone. The customer inputs the license plate number which minimizes parking overlap, Johansen said, meaning each driver will have to input their plate number. The kiosks will also allow the city to establish parking rates by zone or time and there is no specific timeline for implementation yet, according to a staff report.

Hamilton said the project will also give the city a better sense of its parking needs.

“There are a lot of cars parked downtown that don’t belong there, so once that is weeded out we will be able to get a better sense of it,” Hamilton said.

Another important piece of it, Hamilton said, is wayfinding signs that will be installed so people who are unaware of the various city-owned parking lots.

“Because people just drive downtown, don’t see any parking and leave, but maybe they don’t realize there is city-owned parking lots nearby,” Hamilton said.

Contract details

The LAZ contract will cost the city an estimated $2.5 million which will cover five years of service. The city currently makes around $55,000 a month in parking citations but that could rise by 130% in the first year of the program, Johansen said. The partnership with LAZ will also significantly boost that number because the citywide parking enforcement will create more parking violation fees and income. After the first year, he anticipates the number to drop to around 40% to 50% more than what it is now for citations, due to increased compliance around the city.

Yet he admits the city is unaware of what the real outcome will be. Based on a survey the city anticipates an average of $2.67 million to $3 million of annual revenue from the program.

Johansen mentioned the city is working on a long-term parking program for nearby residents but details about it are still not completely worked out. He hopes by offering some sort of overnight parking at a citywide lot for nearby residents will alleviate some of the congestion issues downtown.

The city already has two full-time and three part-time community service officers who handle citywide parking enforcement, which ends around 2:30 p.m. However, he doesn’t want to hire more CSO’s for parking enforcement.

“We simply do not possess the resources to provide adequate citywide parking enforcement on the level that would create the kind of parking situation that residents and businesses are expecting from us,” Johansen said.

Johansen said the CSO’s play a critical role in other police department operations, noting the best alternative is for the city to contract LAZ parking services to handle the city’s day-to-day parking enforcement.

There is a limited pool of applicants for the CSO position, usually younger individuals striving to become a police officer. Required background checks will narrow the applicant field even more, he said. It makes more sense to leave the parking enforcement to LAZ, he said.

LAZ proposes four full-time parking enforcement officers 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday with two to four officers working each day, according to the staff report.

Increased enforcement will likely create frustrations, Johansen said, and outreach should be robust. A police lieutenant will oversee the program, he added.

Merchants react

Some downtown merchants support metered parking and offered suggestions for how the city could use the revenue to improve the area. Josh and Sandana Traxler, owners of Twice as Nice, both said they support the metered parking but with the caveat that the city finds a reasonable solution for merchant parking.

Sandana Traxler said the city should use the revenue to improve downtown.

Now she suggests parking meter revenue be used to improve the lighting in the city-owned parking lots so merchants and customers will feel safer at night.

The other added benefit to the parking meters is it will create more parking turnover, Josh Traxler said.

Another merchant, Grand Leader’s owner Mike Kharsa, echoed the Traxlers’ comments saying he is in favor of the metered parking because the city needs the revenue but is hoping the city uses the money to reinvest in the downtown.

“We don’t bring in the tax dollars that other cities do, so we need every little bit we can get,” Kharsa said.

However, downtown’s merchants need long-term parking too, Kharsa said. Instead, he suggests the city issues placards to the businesses for parking in the city-owned lots. Kharsa said he feels like the City Council doesn’t invest in the downtown because it doesn’t create enough revenue. He also suggested the city uses the revenue from the metered parking to invest in the downtown.

“It should stay downtown for infrastructure improvements and community events,” Kharsa said. “The downtown has charm and character and it needs help from the city to improve it and the parking meter money could be a step in that direction.”

nick@smdailyjournal.com

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