La Jolla ‘Parking Authority’ Heads for Dead End After Stormy 7 Years

Littleton W.T. “Tony” Waller is busy preparing an obituary, the footnote to a stormy seven-year effort to ease the traffic and parking problems of this oceanside community.

Waller, as executive director of the La Jolla Parking and Business Improvement Assn. Inc. (PBIA), is reviewing the group’s successes and failures as well as firing a few salvos at traffic problems, of which there are plenty.

The lump of frustration in Waller’s throat grows larger as he watches the year draw to a close because the PBIA will cease to exist at midnight, Dec. 31. A long-awaited city traffic study made public recently overshadows the group’s carefully prepared studies and accomplishments.

According to the city survey, La Jolla will face near-gridlock traffic conditions on many of its streets by the turn of the century. Even with drastic traffic solutions--like widening streets, limiting on-street parking, converting downtown to one-way traffic patterns, creating an escape route that does not traverse the dreaded Ardath triangle--traffic counts still will increase 33% in the town’s commercial core and in its northern reaches, the survey reported.

With this doomsday traffic forecast facing the community, why did San Diego City Council vote the PBIA out of existence?

Guy Pacurar, who is Deputy Mayor Bill Mitchell’s liaison with La Jolla, summed it up succinctly: “It was felt that the PBIA has outlived its usefulness and effectiveness. Let’s leave it at that.”

The death sentence was handed down in June when the City Council rescinded an ordinance which had assessed La Jolla merchants and raised the fees which supported the PBIA since it was created in November, 1978.

It was in a much different mood that the San Diego council members created the organization and then-Mayor Pete Wilson named seven of the community’s business and civic leaders to its board seven years ago. Those first meetings were filled with planning and dreaming that alarmed some members of the established civic organizations in town--the La Jolla Town Council and La Jollans Inc.

When the PBIA began to be referred to as the “parking authority” by local newspapers and started probing the possibility of building an underground parking garage below the Recreation Center’s tennis courts, the honeymoon was over.

When the appointed PBIA leaders decided that they needed help in meeting their objective--”to act rather than react” to worsening traffic and parking problems--and hired Waller, the grumblings of merchants and residents reached City Hall. PBIA board members were informed that the city, not the PBIA, had the power to hire city employees. The PBIA was reorganized to allow its board members to retain Waller as its one-man staff, but the complaints continued.

One PBIA director, who asked not to be mentioned by name, explained the organization’s problems:

“From Day One, everyone in town expected action. But when a specific proposal was brought up, it always gored someone’s ox and we were told that it was not politically feasible or that it cost too much money. It was like being in a crowded elevator where, when you scratched an itch, someone else got an elbow in the ribs.”

Even planning studies ruffled feathers. When PBIA took on the task of writing the parking and transportation segment of La Jolla’s local coastal plan, La Jollans Inc. protested to the city attorney’s office that it, not the upstart PBIA, was the city-designated long-range community planning group. A letter to that effect was sent to the Coastal Commission but PBIA was allowed to continue what turned out to be a three-year effort.

Most of PBIA’s visible efforts to improve parking in downtown La Jolla were aimed at employees who, a block-by-block census showed, parked on the streets as close to their place of work as possible. Parking time limits were evaded or ignored because La Jolla had only one enforcer.

Now there are three parking patrol officers handing out tickets and new zones that ban parking from 3 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. have been established to prevent workers from beating shoppers to the 4,700 or so close-in street slots, Waller said.

He, with the help of PBIA volunteers, also prowled the commercial area and convinced city traffic engineers to reduce the number of no-parking and truck loading zones, and to convert wide streets into parallel parking. Net gain: about 200 parking spots.

Perhaps the PBIA won more foes than friends when, earlier this year, it joined merchants in circulating petitions backing the installation of parking meters--the ultimate weapon for keeping all-day parkers from hogging the prime parking. Parking meters, Waller admits, are dirty words in La Jolla.

A seemingly harmless survey, commissioned for $2,000 by PBIA, also “raised a stink,” for no apparent reason, he said. The report on “What La Jolla Needs” had some favorably received suggestions--more fashionable department stores, cleaner streets, more off-street parking--but also netted some criticism, he said, from “people who felt we had overstepped our authority.”

But the most direct attack on PBIA came from the community’s weekly newspaper, the La Jolla Light, and columnist John Sasso. Sasso pulled no punches in a July column written after PBIA was ordered disbanded by the San Diego City Council.

Sasso wrote that it was “welcome news” that the PBIA was going out of business at year-end but questioned why it had “taken the City Council six years to discover that the grandiose scheme of an ‘authority’ financed by a doubled business tax will not work.”

The PBIA’s final report, Sasso predicted, will offer “financially infeasible” recommendations, “the same old ‘solutions’ that the association has been unsuccessfully ‘selling’ for the past six years of its existence: perimeter parking lots served by downtown shuttle buses, restriping and redesigning streets, car pooling, formation of a parking district (with assessments financing PBIA?) and a municipal garage.”

Waller and veteran board member Virginia Grizzle responded in the newspaper’s letters column that Sasso’s “diatribe” was unfair and inaccurate. Both listed the organization’s unsung accomplishments and praised its volunteer directors for their efforts.

Sasso, however, had the last word in the newspaper debate, commenting that “the ‘accomplishments’ weren’t worth the almost $400,000 in tax money” PBIA has received over the years and that “mini-bureaucracies aren’t always the answer unless they are carefully planned and constantly monitored.”

PBIA board chairman Robert Collins, who also has served on the board since its first days, told fellow directors last week that the association should make a final statement, a tangible one that would remain as a mark of its existence and not just “go out in a puff of smoke,” to be forgotten quickly.

With the nearly $70,000 in PBIA reserves and about $180,000 in state coastal commission money collected to aid in resolving La Jolla’s parking and traffic problems, Collins said, the group should propose a project that will serve as a monument to its much-maligned, seven years of life.