Probably not me.

Are we recording?

Oh, great.

Okay.

So good evening and welcome to the Monday, February 23rd, 2026 work session of the Australia City Council.

For the record, the time is 617 p.m.

We have two items on our agenda this evening.

The first is the agenda setting process uh calendar.

Mr.

Spence.

Thank you, Mayor City Council.

As you recall, at the city council retreat, we developed an agenda setting process calendar.

Part of the goal there was to ensure that when council members had ideas or initiative they wanted to discuss and deliberate with their fellow counselors.

This would be that opportunity to do that.

We also provided or at that meeting, we discussed a guidance document to make sure that people were clear on what the outcome or the goal was of that actual idea, the purpose, understanding, make sure there's support and a commitment.

And then once those steps were essentially discussed and there's a full discussion deliberation by council, there would hopefully be an opportunity for council feel comfortable to put that on the timeline and put that on calendar so there'd be a more transparent way for council to know when those items are going to be on before the city council.

So we have two issues that we are discussing tonight for the agenda setting calendar.

One is from Councilor Davis related to the city of Storic Parking Plan.

And the other one is trying to schedule an executive session per ORS 192.660, paragraph two i to review and evaluate employment related performance of employees of the city council.

So that'll hand this over back to Councilor Davis.

Sure.

Okay.

So I'm kind of waning this as far as presentation because I also want to uh just have some discussion with council.

So I'm gonna try and keep this relatively short as far as my presentation portion.

Uh, as an introduction, you know, we've been having discussion, including uh the content of the regular session that we just had about doing some sort of parking study.

This is part of probably a larger process of uh transportation planning for the city of Astoria.

And one of the things that I've been sort of pushing for is for us to uh try and save our money on a parking uh assessment, external parking assessment to use uh for technology um assets that uh Chief uh came and talked to us a bit about uh last session uh to do things like efficiently uh record for parking enforcement uh license plates and things like that.

Um the biggest reason that I'm interested in us pursuing uh parking right now and trying to come up with uh a plan for parking, especially in the downtown, is that we have uh some relatively large projects that are on the near horizon uh one to five year horizon uh within the downtown that are likely to have significant impacts on parking.

Um that's that's one of the reasons why we were talking about going out for an RFP.

One of my conventions on on the RFP uh discussion is just that um there's pretty well published modeling uh for how you would figure out what the the impact on an air a park parking in an area would be uh based on the size and occupancy and and type of use of a building.

And I think we can sort of internal source or crowdsource a lot of the data that we would need uh to come to reasonable enough conclusions to put together a parking plan.

Um I distributed a plan uh to the rest of council and um the orientation of the plan is really to try and put some uh parking goals uh on the table to see if uh if they're offensive to the rest of council or not, uh, to try and look through some of the prior data collection, uh the downtown association had done a downtown parking survey, uh volunteer led with with some uh executive staff help uh to in uh 2018 and 2019 and and their assessments uh are included in the document that I had uh distributed, and then just some high-level plan elements uh that you might use to execute uh toward the goals that I'm suggesting.

But to walk through the goals really quickly, um so the basics of uh uh most parking plans, parking management plans uh have to do with trying to use the different resources for parking you have in the most efficient way and to try and prioritize certain uses for certain types of parking in our downtown for the most part.

In our downtown, for the most part, that looks like trying to use our on street parking, that is parking that's like curbside for businesses for people who are visiting the downtown so that they immediately can get to their destination and essentially spend their money.

You use off site, off-street parking for other uses, employees, uh residents, owners of buildings to come to the downtown and not be taking up that curbside parking so that they're not competing with people who would otherwise be spending money in our downtown.

So the goals are prioritized in that way.

So on street parking prioritized for customer and visitor usage in destination areas.

Right now, I think we're talking about downtown, but I think a adaptable parking plan would be applicable to Uniontown, Upper Town, any anywhere where there's a concentration of businesses and that you might have overburdened parking.

You target on street parking occupancy of 85% or less.

That generally corresponds to one or two open spots per block facing.

So again, the idea is if you're coming to the downtown, you see an open spot, you can almost immediately park.

You target turnover uh in parking in destination areas.

So again, we're wanting people to come and go to dinner, go to a show, uh, go to a shop, spend money in the downtown, get us get a service like like a haircut, and then depart from the downtown so somebody else can come in and get the next haircut.

And so you you target turnover and you make policies around that.

And then you you have off-street parking assets.

So this is parking lots, parking garages.

We don't have so so many of the garage assets yet.

Um, but you target those off-street parking assets for long-term use, uh, so that that's that on street parking can be short term, and you target a lot of off-street parking outside of the district.

So that's just a like resource usage.

Land is expensive in a downtown, uh, it's cheaper right outside of the downtown.

So if we're going to have efficient usage at our highest level of our land, uh we try to have those like parking garages outside of the downtown floor.

And then um, we also there's a couple of goals here that are assessing the fact that uh if if we start doing something like paid parking, which is how you would get to some of these targets, uh, it's going to have effects on residential areas.

Our parking district already has effects on the near residential areas in the downtown.

Like if you look at the study that the ADHDA did, and uh there's I I don't know if you want to bring up probably any of the maps, Ryan, uh, that show density, it would show this.

But you you have like stems going into the neighborhoods that are outside of the district.

In this one, it's it's really the the neighborhoods up by the Astorian building.

Um, and on the next one, it's like the neighborhoods that are uh up by Civic and uh up the hill from City Hall.

People park in the neighborhood because parking is limited downtown.

Right now it's just limited by the two-hour limit and uh a ticket.

Um, but if you start doing things like trying to have responsive metered parking in the downtown to encourage people uh to distribute themselves either in the downtown or to go to off-street parking, uh people will try to park in the neighborhood.