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o"f/ - /% Working with the Community In addition to analyzing the current and projected parking needs in Downtown and researching the breadth of approaches (good and bad) used in other cities, staff also held a series of three interactive public workshops with Downtown stakeholders. The purpose was to help them understand the challenges that lie ahead and our options for dealing with them, as well as for staff to learn from those "in the trenches" what are the problems and strengths of our parking system and what they feel is needed to make it better. Workshop #1 was held on March 15` During this meeting staff gave a presentation discussing the factors laid out in the introduction to this report—the new patterns of parking use that will likely result upon the opening of the cinema, the high cost of building new parking, the park once nature of Downtown, etc. There was then a lively discussion period where the attendees asked staff questions and voiced some of their concerns. Workshop #2 was help on March 29` For this session, staff brought a menu of the options available to us to the group and explain the advantages and disadvantages of each. An interactive game was then played in which the group plotted areas which they thought were best for employee and customer parking, and also what they thought were the best approaches for issues such as time limits, prices, etc. The results of this exercise are included at the end of this report in figures 11 through 13. At Workshop #3, which was held on April 12, staff unveiled their recommendations for Downtown parking. The details of how this proposed system would work were described, and why each aspect was chosen was explained in detail. The attendees were very supportive, and offered great suggestions for refinements to make the plan even better. Greater attendance would have been helpful, but in a11 other respects the workshops were a great success. The stakeholders really seemed to grasp the difficulty of managing parking in a lively, walkable downtown and were very receptive to changing the system in order to make it work well under the new circumstances that will arise later this year. In addition, staff learned an incredible amount from those with first-hand knowledge about Downtown's needs and that knowledge has benefited this plan tremendously. The Focus of the Parking Management Plan The issues discussed above are very important to the success of Downtown's parking system. However, there are two additional issues which are of even greater importance and which are the focus of this report. They are public parking management and parking requirements for new development. This report at this time will only deal with parking management. Parking requirements will be a future topic that staff will bring to the Planning Commission and then to the City Council. Public parking management refers to how we regulate City-owned parking in order to ensure that it is used as efficiently and effectively as possible. There are 2,856 City-owned parking spaces in pas�e 11