Council OK’s ordinance to streamline Burbank parking permit process

Burbank’s process for a preferential parking designation will soon get a little simpler. The City Council this week voted 4-1 to adopt a new ordinance to alleviate the burden for residents seeking permit parking in their neighborhoods, but officials said it will likely saddle the city’s minimal staff administering the program with a lot more work.

Parking issues have been a concern for the council and the subject of a number of complaints and conflicts over the past few years. Mayor Bob Frutos cited recent statistics of calls to the Burbank Police Department that illustrated the problems.

“In a one-week period we had over 900 ... calls for service,” Frutos said. Only four were for high-priority situations, and, of the remainder, “the majority were for parking-related issues.”

NEWSLETTER: Stay up to date with what’s going on in and around your neighborhood >>

The ordinance is intended to relieve some of the parking strain by streamlining the application process and reducing the eligibility requirements for residential blocks seeking restricted parking.

City Manager Mark Scott said the measure is less than perfect — future “refinements,” such as ironing out how appeals will be handled, will be needed. However, he had promised to bring it to council in January and, he said, jokingly, “I got it to you on Jan. 33rd.”

Some residents have pleaded for help addressing parking hassles for more than a year. At the council meeting on Tuesday, residents waited through a nearly three-hour hearing on another matter before they could say their piece on the issue the ordinance is meant to address.

“Been here a while,” said Rick Warmack, a resident of Kenwood Street. “I can tell you that the problems that we’ve described over the last 12 to 14 months have not gotten any better.”

Councilman David Gordon, who voted against the ordinance, said he was sympathetic to the fact that Warmack and others have been waiting a year, but said he wanted a more “protracted” process of designing the parking program’s revisions and a better handle on expected costs. The changes, he said, need to be “very carefully tuned.”

Instead of requiring three separate petitions, with a six-month waiting period between each, to ratchet up restrictions from an initial two-hour parking zone, then one-hour limits, then resident-only parking, the new ordinance allows residents to petition for the most restrictive limits on the first application.

It also lowers the bar for obtaining the two-hour or one-hour limits by one-third. Zones will be eligible for those restrictions if a field study finds nonresident vehicles are regularly occupying 50% of the on-street parking during the time of day for which the restrictions are being sought.

The current 75% standard will remain in place for petitions seeking permit-only parking.

The process for residents who can show nonresident parking has been diverted to their blocks soon after a new restricted zone is designated nearby is also simplified.

A new process, involving a hearing before the Traffic Commission and periodic review, will allow areas with residences outnumbering parking spots to petition for restricted parking if a unique situation is causing unusual hardships.

The full fiscal impact is not yet clear. According to city staff, these changes will likely lead many more residents to seek restricted parking, requiring more administration staff — Scott said probably two more people — and more enforcement officials, another two more workers, plus other costs.

The staff that administers the program and conducts field studies now is rather small. Jeanne Keeler, the city’s parking analyst, said, “There is no ‘we’ in parking — it’s me.”

Scott said staff is poised to take on the extra work, but not all at once. He estimated that it could take two years to address the influx of restricted parking applications the city is likely to receive in the first year after the ordinance takes effect in a little more than a month.

--

Chad Garland, chad.garland@latimes.com

Twitter: @chadgarland