And to regular business, the first agenda item is approval of the Laura parking lot program transfer to a DDA.

Executive Director Keating.

Great.

Thanks everyone.

So I know we've been talking a lot about parking lots, a long road to get here.

But the objective tonight is to report out on the work that Faith Tim and I have been doing in the parking lot committee.

So review the existing parking lot program and then consider formally accepting 12 lots into the DDA public parking lot program.

So the agenda tonight, I'm gonna step back for a moment and um talk about a downtown parking management study, which is kind of the foundation for our approach for these lots, then give an overview of the Laura parking lot program.

I'll talk about where the DDA parking lot committee landed as far as which lots to continue with.

So far, I'm gonna dive into what is a parking management study.

Um a parking management study looks at your downtown or a specific area and how parking is used and strategies for um managing it.

And so often these studies look at the existing parking supply, so in our case, looking at all the different lots, uh parking utilization, looking at uh uh parking counts during a period of time and um what is particularly in a peak period, and looking at what uh the utilization is, and then parking duration and turnover, or are people staying a long time, or um are they workers that are just parking in there, or are there customers that are coming and going use behavior?

This can be related to signage, um, is it clear or do they understand where things are?

Future demand.

This is a a big portion of the parking management study that I'll share in a second about um over time as development happens, we still have adequate parking supply, and then management studies strategies.

Um these are really kind of like your toolkit for how you want to manage parking as things fluctuate.

Not everything's gonna happen at once.

It's not gonna like you're gonna turn a switch and development all happens.

Um so this is a kind of like a roadmap for how um you think about parking in this specific area and how you want to manage it.

So in twenty twenty-five, um, the Lafayette Urban Renewal Authority, one of the last things they did was uh contracted with Fox Tuttle Transportation Group.

They are a transportation consulting firm that does a lot of work in Lafayette and also in the Denver Metro region.

And they did a parking management study.

Um they evaluated parking supply, equalization, future redevelopment impacts, uh, and downtown made some recommendations.

And so the study area for this um plan was from Emma North and included the Bob Burger Rec Center.

Um we all are aware that this is not the entire boundary of our downtown, but this is a core of where we see a lot of the parking happen happening.

It also in a way um was intentional because we did a similar study in 2011 for this exact area.

So it was helpful to use the same boundary to see how things have changed.

Um we didn't include baseline because those it's on a CDAT highway, for instance, and those all that parking is really contained on those individual sites.

This downtown core has on-street parking, off-street parking, and has a shared public parking lot.

So this is I just wanted to recognize that this doesn't cover our entire boundary.

So the parking counts were collected during um a weekday evening peak period, uh, spring of last year from 4 30 to 6 30 p.m.

And um the benefit of this is the study has helped informed the parking approach for the new land use code.

Our land use code right now has parking restrictions that are excessive for how we're seeing people do development more sustainably by not having giant parking fields or overparking different development, but really trying to promote multimodal and shared parking lots as a way to just promote walkability in downtowns.

So the study looked at three categories of parking.

The first is on-street parking within these areas.

The second was private parking lots, so properties that had parking that served just their customers or just their site, and public parking lots, and these were the shared parking lots that Laura had.

The great news is that in looking at the study, each of these zones had excess in parking during the initial parking counts, which is great.

It means that when you come to this area, you are able to find reasonable parking within your destination.

I will also caveat that parking is a very personal thing, and it also is a very perception thing.

Everyone has a different perception of it.

You could try to park in front of your favorite restaurant, and if you have to park around the block, you may think there's a parking problem.

There's other people who are used to parking and walking places, and so I will just caveat that of everyone kind of interfaces with parking a little bit differently.

So we then looked at future redevelopment and parking demand.

And because we're in the process of redoing our land use code, and we're looking at reducing parking requirements for our downtown, which will allow just more buildable area for businesses and customers and shopping.

We wanted to look at, let's say that we, if everyone in the future redevelops the potential of their site, what parking issues might we have?

And so it assumed significant mixed-use redevelopment and adaptive reuse over time.

The consultant worked with our works with our planning team to kind of look at each lot and kind of create an envelope as far as what could be built there, thinking about stories and setbacks, and then looked at what the demand was in the current situation and kind of applied those counts to the downtown and calibrated that.

Plus you.

We're trying to promote less curb cuts on public road in the long term.

So you kind of go to the alley to do parking.

So it's a it's a long-term strategy, so we said, what if we did that?

And the great news is for this area, there's really only two zones that are impacted where you want to be proactive about a strategy.

And so in zone two, there are has a primary um becomes a primary concern for parking constraints.

And zone two is public just to where the auto body shop is on baseline.

And it makes sense why there would be constraints here because there isn't on-street parking and it's really limited.

Um, and so, in a way, um we we would look to our planning department when those things come online that they do have adequate parking on site for those developments.

I think a great example is some of the baseline mixed use projects.

They know that if they want to have customers come there or mixed use development, they're gonna need adequate parking.

So those projects we're seeing having more parking on site.

The other one is zone three, and this also makes sense because this is really where we're seeing a lot of the investment that has already happened in our downtown.