Downtown parking

It’s time for Kelowna to get serious about providing parking downtown.

Parking in Kelowna’s downtown core has steadily been eroded over the last 20 years. Today, merchants and their patrons are frustrated by the lack of reliable parking.

The City of Kelowna eliminated public parking on Queensway in 1998. Many other projects since, including renovations to Bernard in 2012, have eliminated additional parking downtown. A proposal to turn Lawrence and Leon into two-way streets could eliminate “up to 180 parking stalls,” according to the City.

The City recently sold a 60 stall parking lot at Lawrence and Ellis for $2.6 million to a developer. In a time where parking is at peak capacity, the City should be creating more parking, not selling it off to be developed.

In 2015, the Memorial Parkade was built to service the new Interior Health staff and to replace surface parking that was lost when the Interior Health building went up. Overall, the parkade added no new net spaces. Nearly 200 spaces created in the addition to the Library Parkade— set to open this spring—have already been rented out and the waitlist for downtown parking is over 400 names long.

Kelowna is in desperate need of new parkades, but according to the City, there are insufficient funds in the Parking Reserve to allow for the construction of a new parkade. Despite the lack of parking, the City maintains its push to get more people living downtown.

Further, the City continues to allow developers to put up cash in lieu of creating parking spaces. The idea is that the City will use the money to create new off-street parking options; however, the numbers simply don’t add up. Developers pay $22,500 for each stall that they neglect to create so that the City can build conglomerated off street parking. Unfortunately, the City estimates it spends $35,000 per new stall; effectively subsidizing developers who don’t want to provide parking. This puts an overwhelming burden on existing parking spaces and is not fair to Kelowna taxpayers and downtown merchants.

With the Parking Reserve fund in turmoil, how do we fix the parking problem in downtown Kelowna?

For starters, the City needs to stop lowering required parking ratios for downtown developments. A typical development in the Mission requires 1.5 parking spaces per unit, but developments downtown only require 1.

The City needs to extend paid parking hours on the street to 9 p.m. and make parkade spaces less expensive or free after 6 p.m. This will force downtown employees to use off street parking, allowing downtown patrons to cycle through on street parking spaces (instead of one vehicle staying parked all night). Extending paid parking hours will also increase revenues which can then be used to fund much needed parking projects.

Mitch LaRue