City Council Agenda and Packet 1999 01 05

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it will also help to nurture and develop a historic district which attracts the appreciation and sales: revenues of tourists and visitors from far away. She stated that she feels the ordinance will restrain a sudden burden on new parking and the resulting increase in traffic which may provide other problems of downtown Louisville. Erik Hartronft, 801 Main Street. Louisville. Colorado, stated that he believes the ordinance is meant to stop development downtown and will discourage the small business person from developing their business. He agrees with the concept of a parking impactfee and he has worked on obtaining consensus with the small business owners over the past year. He stated that there is clearly not a consensus on the ordinance as proposed tonight and does not see any reason to declare this as an emergency. He expressed strong disagreement that the City would be subsidizing parking downtown. He believes that at $5,000 per space, if the City is double selling that space, this generates $10,000 per space and parking could be built for less than that. He questioned the City spending $70,000 per year to administer 200 parking spaces and felt that this represents businesses subsidizing City government. He requested clarification on whether a business owner would be required to provide parking for the additional square footage from an expansion in addition to any deficit that existed prior to the expansion. He did not believe this ordinance will help downtown Louisville. He questioned why landscaping requirements along McCaslin Boulevard would be applied to downtown, especially around parking spaces. He suggested that the emergency should be adopting the Downtown Development Design Guidelines and not a parking ordinance. He expressed disappointment for the methods used to notify residents on the possible adoption of this ordinance. Debbie Krueger read the following statement for Rhonda Grassi, 916 Main Street, Louisville, Colorado. who was unable to attend. "I would like to express my support for a parking permit system. A fee based system will help define the parking needs of Louisville. I believe the City should not put up parking meters in the downtown areas. This would greatly distract from the beauty of downtown. In establishing the parking improvement fee, please consider dropping the proposed $5,000 per space fee to something more reasonable. The intent of the fee should not be prohibitive of growth. Downtown property owners will not own a space for their contributions. They will have nothing to sell in the future. The $5,000 per space will almost pay 100% of the cost of this space.' If you impose a fee on top of that, and the Mayor has proposed issuing two permits per space, you will be asking the downtown property owners to pay for that space more than once. If a fee is imposed. I would like a task force created by disbursing the funds. This group should be made up of citizens of the downtown property and business owners, as well as the Council members. If the parking need is never as great as anticipated, or if the fund has a surplus. the fee should not be continued. The ordinance says that a fee can never be returned. If the use of the space changes. a fee will be imposed. If the use of a space changes from requiring a fee to not requiring a fee, will it suffice that the fee was paid once, or will the fee be continually imposed? All of Louisville will benefit from downtown being viable. The City has a surplus of tax revenue and has given tax incentives to a large company based on the fact 10