City praised for downtown plan

DOWNTOWN GLENDALE — Members of the city’s business community commended the city Thursday for creating an innovative, well thought-out plan for downtown development and related strategies to keep traffic flowing as the downtown area grows.

Most of the nearly 30 attendees at Thursday’s meeting praised the presentation on the city’s downtown specific plan — essentially a zoning tool to determine the future of the physical form of downtown Glendale, city urban designer Alan Loomis said — and its correlating mobility study, which addresses the issues of traffic and parking as the downtown area grows.

“I thought it was a very good presentation,” said Rosemary Montana, who owns a consulting firm in Glendale.

Loomis gave the businessmen and women a brief overview of exactly what the plan entails, including its vision of making downtown Glendale a vibrant place for residential, business and cultural needs.

He also touched upon the plan’s proposals to implement more than a dozen different districts in the downtown area, and to offer incentives to developers to offer featureslike open space.

“This gives us the zoning tools to make this vision happen,” Loomis said.

Attendees questioned how parking and traffic issues would be managed in a growing downtown like the one the plan envisions.

Bonnie Nelson, who is with the Nelson/Nygaard firm the city hired to do the mobility study, offered solutions with a series of ideas ranging from better public transit to paid parking on Brand Boulevard.

“In downtown Glendale, you’ve kind of run out of opportunities for enhanced capacity, so we have to think over things,” she said.

Nelson suggested better transit systems that will link the whole downtown area, more incentives for people to walk and bike downtown, $1-per-hour street parking on Brand Boulevard and free 90-minute parking in the city’s garages to increase their uses, and reduced parking minimums for commercial developments.

“Parking is like a car magnet,” she said, adding that the type of people who are going to be moving into the downtown area will likely have fewer cars, and will walk or take public transit to their destinations.

But some attendees took issue with an idea to reduce the number of parking spaces a commercial developer must provide per city code for its development.

“Not everybody is going to be living and working in the city,” Glendale architect Aram Kazazian said. “What happens if you get a job in a different location? Your husband works out of the city, then you’re going to have more cars.”

He also disagreed with one of Nelson’s suggestions to put metered parking on some of the residential streets that abut the downtown as a way of protecting those neighborhoods from outside parkers.

“They have some good ideas, but I would really like to see some more time spent developing those ideas,” Kazazian said.

The ideas presented were innovative, but it’s a learning process, Montana said.

“We have to think about it and see will it really work,” she said. “What we have here now is obviously not working, so maybe we should try some of these things,” she said.