My travel schedule forced me to leave the Brainerd Planning Commission when my term ended a couple of years ago. I just couldn’t reliably attend the meetings and it wasn’t fair to anyone, especially since there was one applicant that was (or so I was told) timing their applications to ensure they would be heard when I wouldn’t be there. It wasn’t the right place for me to serve my community, so I left at the end of my term.
The pandemic, however, gave me a lot of free time and I found myself migrating back to two committees I thought I could help out on: the city’s charter commission and an ad-hoc parking committee. With my travel schedule picking up again, it’s unclear how long I can continue in these roles, but we’ve had some interesting and fruitful conversations on the parking committee that are worth sharing here.
There has been a dramatic shift in tone here in recent years. It seemed not long ago that I, along with many others, were resisting calls for the city to build a parking garage downtown. We have a bizarre amount of parking: the data we’ve now gotten a look at affirms that we rarely use even 70% of the public parking, let alone the acres of private parking lots sitting largely empty. The shift is that most people seem to get that we don’t have a lack of parking.
Many concur that we have too much.
This has freed us up to have some really advanced conversations about how to make the best use of the space we have. Particularly fruitful is a discussion on how to create a marketplace for parking, one that induces private property owners with excess parking to sell to those who want it. This can’t happen with the city as the low bidder, taking a continual loss on acres of surface parking, while depressing both the value and the level of opportunity in the core downtown.
A simple increase in price by the city will go a long way to making everything work better.
I know this is going to be a little bit in the weeds, but today I’m going to share the plan I offered to my colleagues on the parking committee. To be fair, they did not all agree with all of this and they each offered their own written versions — which were very good and had great ideas I did not include in mine. The next meeting will hopefully synthesize areas of agreement.
Still, my hope is that my thought process can benefit those who are thinking through similar issues.
You can download a pdf copy of my proposal here.
Charles Marohn is a Professional Engineer (PE) and a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP). He’s the Founder and President of StrongTowns.org . He was named one of the 10 Most Influential Urbanists of all time by Planetizen in 2017.