Study Finds That Downtown Parking in Ojai Is Plentiful

After years of debate over whether Ojai has enough downtown parking, officials said they are relieved at the results of a six-month study.

The city hired a Santa Monica consulting firm for $30,000 last October to analyze current and future parking needs. Researchers interviewed shoppers and business people and even recorded vehicle license numbers to determine how many exceeded posted time limits of one or two hours.

The 60-page report concludes that Ojai has plenty of parking spaces to meet the current demand but that they need to be better managed.

Should additional business growth occur, the study projects that only 50 more parking spaces will be needed in the next 10 years under “a worst-case scenario.”

For now, it recommends imposing one-hour limits on 72 public parking spaces, urging workers to park farther away from stores and adding street signs directing motorists to municipal lots. There are no parking meters in the city.

The Ojai Redevelopment Commission is recommending that the City Council consider adopting most of the suggestions on May 28.

“We had so many high-rise ideas and it all boiled down to utilizing what we had,” Commissioner Robert Laszlo said. “The simplest idea of changing the (time-limit) signs never occurred to me.”

However, Laszlo and other commissioners worry that shoppers might be “pushed to the point of paranoia” in one-hour zones. They want more two-hour zones to be considered. “We don’t want to kill the golden goose,” said Commissioner Alan Rains, a downtown department store owner.

As it is, the study found that only 5% of motorists exceed current time limits. It also discovered the highest demand for parking space in Ojai occurs between 1 and 2 p.m. daily.