I've received a number of requests to write about the Colorado Boulevard Pilot Community Parking District, which has come to the forefront due to the application of the Fat Dog Lounge for a Conditional Use Permit to serve a full line of alcoholic beverages for on-site consumption (planning talk for "to be consumed in the restaurant and bar as opposed to be carried away like from a liquor store or market) and for some exceptions to the Colorado Boulevard Specific Plan requirements, including the use of parking credits, as provided in the Pilot Parking Program, rather than providing on-site parking as required by the municipal code.

For the purposes of brevity (a relative term when writing about land use matters), if not clarity, I'm going to limit this discussion to the Pilot Parking Program and not the merits of Fat Dog's application. Most of what follows has been taken from the various City staff reports to the City Planning Commission or the City Council's Planning and Land Use Management Committee, prepared by Jane Blumenfeld and her staff in the City Planning Department and ERCPR's talented consultant, Mott Smith. Any misinterpretation of the Pilot Parking Program, implementing ordinance and guidelines are no doubt mine.

After a summer of discussion and public hearings and meetings, the City Council voted to approve an ordinance amending the Colorado Boulevard Specific Plan to create a pilot Community Parking District within the Specific Plan Area. For those of you not familiar with the Colorado Boulevard Specific Plan, it too is an ordinance that imposes more stringent planning and land use regulations than are required by the City's Planning and Zoning Code along Colorado Boulevard between approximately Eagle Vista on the East and the Glendale Freeway on the West. It's available on the City Planning Department's web site at http://www.lacity.org/pln . Once on the web site, click "General Plan" in the left hand column and then click on "Specific Plans" from the list of choices and then click on "Colorado Boulevard".

One of the primary reasons for creating the Pilot Parking Program was to make it possible to preserve the existing pedestrian scaled commercial buildings along Colorado Boulevard and provide an alternative means for businesses to meet the parking requirements of the Specific Plan.

Eagle Rock has long been working on reviving its business district, seeking uses such as restaurants and pedestrian oriented retail stores, preserving potentially historic buildings and discouraging mini- malls with parking lots in front of businesses. And one of the biggest obstacles to creating a pedestrian oriented urban village has been the parking requirements in the Specific Plan.

It is hoped that the Pilot Parking Program will help revitalize Colorado Boulevard while at the same time address the parking needs of the community and the economic realities of real estate development.

The onsite parking requirements imposed by the Specific Plan has the impact of reducing the available building area for most new developments in commercial districts. Analysis carried out in researching the need for the pilot parking program showed that onsite parking requirements could result in the loss of more than 50% of the available floor area for projects on typical properties along Colorado Boulevard. This means that on a typical commercially zoned parcel on Colorado Boulevard of 7,500 square feet in area, a maximum one story development could only have 3,125 square feet of floor area, the rest of the lot being taken up by surface parking spaces. And a one story restaurant meeting that same parking requirement would have an area of only 1,665 square feet.

Code required on-site parking is also applied to existing buildings when a business changes its use. There are credits given through a complex formula for existing buildings, taking into account the use and available parking, but when an owner wants to convert a building from a liquor store into a café, prior to the adoption of the Pilot Parking Program, all parking requirements had to be met. For such projects, the options were to leave the building and use as it is; seek a variance to reduce or waive required parking; demolish the existing building and construct an auto- oriented building like a mini-mall; or purchase a site within 750 feet in a commercial zone, clear the site, and turn it into a parking lot to serve the new use. None of these options was desirable for Eagle Rock.

The Pilot Parking Program was conceived to allow businesses to meet their parking requirements off site and to provide a mechanism for addressing the parking problems brought about by a change of use along Colorado Boulevard. The intent was to make pedestrian-friendly, smaller uses economically viable on typical commercially zoned parcels in the area. It was also intended to provide residents, property, and business owners with an assurance that neighborhood parking would be available for new uses in Eagle Rock and that available parking would not be oversubscribed.

In July and August of 2005, the City Planning Department conducted a comprehensive survey, designed by the City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation, to document the rate of utilization of each of the parking spaces identified along Colorado Boulevard between College View and Loleta Avenues and on Eagle Rock Boulevard between Colorado Boulevard and Yosemite Drive. The survey counted the number of cars parked in each space on an hourly basis for each hour between 8:00 and midnight, on two weekdays and two Saturdays. At any give time, at least 45% of the total number of parking spaces available were unused. The average number of unused parking spaces during particular times of the day and days of the week form a pool of parking spaces from which parking credits could be made available for public parking. But for the Pilot Program, the 467 metered and non-metered on-street spaces and the 71 spaces on the three city-owned parcels in the Specific Plan area were used to determine available credits.

The Pilot Program created two districts along Colorado Boulevard, one east of Highland View Avenue and one west of Highland View Avenue. Each district encompasses one of Colorado Boulevard's two high activity commercial notes, located at Eagle Rock and Colorado Boulevards and at Townsend Avenue and Colorado Boulevard. All unused publicly owned parking spaces within each district during each of the hours of the day form the basis of the credit pool in the district. A parking credit is established when the field survey showed that one available space exists in the zone during any of the four time periods. Credits are divided into "weekday day credits", "weekday night credits", "weekend day credits", and weekend-night credits," reflecting the different utilization rates for the different times of day. Businesses wishing to open up in the Pilot Parking Program area are able to buy the required number of credits determined necessary by the Department of Transportation, depending on the proposed use of the business and the times and days that business will operate.

Parking credit requirements were determined by the Department of Transportation, using the number of parking spaces required by the City's Municipal Code and modifying those rates utilizing the Urban Land Institute's Shared Parking procedures. The shared parking rates assume that visitors make more than one stop when shopping in a commercial district, to reflect a more realistic parking rate for a commercial street like Colorado Boulevard. By applying the percentage of parking demand to each land use and to each time period, parking credit requirements were established.

Using these requirements, if an owner wanted to open a new restaurant having an area of 2,000 square feet that was open 24 hours a day on Colorado Boulevard, the owner would be required to purchase 66 credits (7 + 10 + 6 + 10 X 2)

The cost of each parking credit is $39.00 so our sample 2,000 square foot restaurant would pay $1,574.00 per year.

The parking credit program will allow small businesses to open in existing, pedestrian oriented buildings that the community has been seeing to preserve to enhance the character of the community. It will also allow neighborhood scale pedestrian oriented new development on the smaller commercial lots that are typical in Eagle Rock. Hopefully the Pilot Parking Program will act as a catalyst for increased pedestrian activity along the boulevards. People will be parking and walking to different destinations, increasing the pedestrian circulation along the boulevards.

Just to make sure that things remain complicated, along with the staff reports and the ordinance, there are also "Implementing Guidelines", which are supposed to go to the intent of the ordinance, but in some cases seem to be capable of causing great confusion and misunderstanding. Major elements of the guidelines deal with who can purchase credits, how the purchase of credits works, who can utilize credits, the number of credits that can be purchased, and the size of the businesses that can use the credits. The summary of the guidelines is:

· Only property or business owners may purchase parking credits, all of which must be purchased from the City of Los Angeles (no black market in parking credits)

· Purchased parking credits remain committed to the business or use for which they were purchased through December 31 of each year, except that the purchaser may voluntarily agree to vacate a premise and transfer the credits to a new user on the same site or return the credits to the Parking Credit Pool at any time;

· Failure to pay for the Credits by January 10th will result in them reverting back to the pool of available credits for purchase by others. The City will immediately initiate procedures to revoke use permits and certificates of occupancy for those businesses or uses for which credits were purchased.

· Once credits are purchased, the purchaser has a right to renew them annually.

· Credits may be used to satisfy all or a portion of the required parking spaces for commercial, retail, and restaurant uses.

· Residential and institutional uses may NOT utilize parking credits.

· Parking credits may be purchased for a site that occupies 18,000 square feet of land area or less.

· Parking credits shall be available for up to 2,500 square feet per use or per business license.

· Parking credits are available to a property and/or business with a larger square footage provided there has been a review and approval of the project application by the Design Review Board for Subarea II of the Colorado Boulevard Specific Plan.

· Credits may not be banked.

· Because the main purpose of the parking credit pilot program is to stimulate reuse of existing buildings and new development at a neighborhood scale, no more the 50 credits may be purchased by a single project.

· Parking credits do not run with the land. A change of ownership of a use or building does not necessitate a modification of parking credits.