Good evening and welcome. The Wednesday, March 6, 2024, City of Plantation Joint City Councilable Affordable Housing Advisory Committee, Gateway Advisory Board, Midtown Advisory Board, Planning and Zoning Board, and Sustainability and Resiliency Advisory Board Parking Workshop is now called to order at 6.01. Ms. Beggaroe, please call the roll. Council Member Anderson. Here. Council Member Andreu. Here. Council Member Fadgen. Here. Council Member Horland. Here. Council Member Reinstein. No, it's not a key. Mayor Sortel. Here. City Attorney Ezreal. Here. Okay, we've got Affordable Housing Committee. Mr. Cordova. Ms. Alamea. You want them to yell out? Yep. Yell out. If you're here, please say yes. Okay, so Maggie's Alamea. Ms. Albrock. Ms. Drummond. Mr. Dutko. Mr. Rosenstein. Here. Mayor Sortel. Mr. Bueller. Gateway. Mr. Bingham. Mr. Bromonte. Mr. Brady. Mr. Anson. Ms. Duet. Mr. Hooley. Okay. Midtown. Mr. Lethbridge. Mr. Tyrer. Tyrer? Did I say that right? Ms. Bush. Mr. Duke. Right. Ms. Padrino. Nina Cabral. Okay. Sustainability. Dr. Peach. Dr. Schwobel. Dr. Long. Maria Oliva. Gittel Ruiz-Nicholas. And Mr. Ima. Mr. Wynn. Planning and Zoning. Mr. Speer. Mr. Stahl. Ms. Demi Berger. Mr. Corman. Here. Mr. Freeman. Mr. Goldstein. Here. And Ms. Gelfand. Okay. All right. That was fun. What's that? Ms. Bush just arrived. Thank you. We're going to start with the pledge because we had a little mix up with our calendar. But Council Member Andrea. Thank you so much, President Vagin. The Pledge of Allegiance this evening will be presented by the students from Plantation Park Elementary School accompanied by the elocution moderator and teacher, Ms. Carrie Peterson. And I did not see Dr. Osgood. Oh, Ms. DeVeo, the assistant principal, is here as well. So if the students would please come to the microphone and make sure the green light is on. And they will be leading us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Okay. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Don't go anywhere. We have a few questions for you. And then we're going to give you a certificate for leading us in the Pledge of Allegiance this evening. So if you could tell everybody what school you're from and tell them what grade you're in, your teacher's name, and then the title of the poem that you recited. Okay. Well, my name is Olivia Livingston. I am from Plantation Park Elementary. My teacher is Ms. Alexander, and I recited the poem, I Found a Four-Leaf Clover by Jack Perlutsky in the Elocution Finals. My name is Bron Lusis. I'm in kindergarten. My teacher is Ms. Cordero. Do you remember your poem? I saw my teacher on a Saturday. All right. So can you tell them a little bit? So every single grade at Plantation Park Elementary competes in the Elocution Preliminaries. We each have a poem selected for our grade, and each class has to do the same poem. Whoever wins first in each class gets to compete against the other first place winners and the other greats. And then we only have a first. The other ones are runner-ups, and you choose a poem that you do for the Elocution Finals. And, well, whoever wins, wins first. The others are runner-ups. Thank you so much for the time. Okay. Mr. Alpert or Danny. Good evening, Mr. Chair, members of the council. Just for the record, Dan Holmes, Planning and Zoning Director. I just wanted to, first of all, just thank everybody for coming out tonight as we try to talk about something as boring as parking. But parking has really, has some very big implications on many things that are kind of happening in the world of planning and, you know, development. And we're going to kind of talk about some of those things this evening, kind of talk about some of the changes that are sort of pushing us to really take a look at the parking code and why it is important. As you know, it has implications on affordable housing and so many other things. So we kind of elevated our discussion on parking. We were kind of pushing the sign code first, but based on some of the things we've been working with, with regard to the affordable housing committee, we kind of pushed parking, you know, to the forefront. Not that we've forgotten about signage is very, very important as well. So we're going to kind of just talk about, you know, as you'll see the presentation, just kind of talk about a little bit of the history, kind of what's going on now in terms of parking and just kind of raise some questions in terms of the direction that we wish to go. And so we've prepared a presentation, which Mr. Alpert will kind of present to you guys this evening. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Good evening, council members, board members, city attorney, city clerk, and audience. I'm Michael Alpert, assistant director of planning, zoning, and economic development. On behalf of the PZED department, I will be conducting a brief presentation after which we will open up for dialogue for both the city council and the invited board members, which include planning and zoning board, affordable housing advisory committee, midtown and gateway advisory boards, as well as sustainability and resiliency advisory board. Please note that a draft version of the PowerPoint was uploaded with the agenda last week. However, there are some slight changes to that presentation, not much, just a little bit. So I'm ready with my laser pointer, my notebook for copious note taking. And as soon as the presentation comes up, I'll begin. Should I make the sound of a static television or something? I'd like to thank Ed Lynn for all the backup material. There's a lot to read. It's good. We can wait. I don't care. We can wait to the council. We can do it now. You want to do it now? So while we're waiting on this, Council Member Andreu is going to lead us in the invocation introduction. So let her take over. Thank you, President Fadgen. So as everybody knows, March is National Women's History Month, and I want to thank administration for another wonderful banner here at the podium. The theme this year for 2024 is Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. And I normally don't read things verbatim, but the National Women's History Alliance had a wonderful opening that I thought was fitting for today. The National Women's History theme, as I said, is Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. The theme recognizes women throughout the country who understand that for a positive future, we need to eliminate bias and discrimination entirely from our lives and institutions. Women from every background have long realized that an uneven playing field will never bring equality or justice. Many feel the critical need to speak up and work harder for fairness in our institutions and our social interactions. So during 2024, we recognize the example of women who are committed to embracing everyone and excluding no one in our common quest for freedom and opportunity. So I especially would love to recognize my colleague, Ms. Councilmember Denise Horland, and all of the women who serve and work for our city, particularly our police department and our fire department. So I really would love to recognize those women and ask that everybody continue to advocate for equity, diversity and inclusion. Thank you. Okay, thank you. It looks like we're back on track. We're going to get ahead of schedule now, later. We will be sharing how we got here from the past, which led to the adoption of the current parking code. Next, we will discuss the present time with the proposals from staff. And finally, we will briefly discuss the future where we may want to go as a society and technology adapts to global and national trends. In your backup, you have received numerous articles that either discuss parking directly or touch upon parking and or housing issues complemented by societal trends. To summarize, some of the major changes include an increase in household size due to the lack of affordable housing options, particularly for younger people and seniors. Therefore, the parking needs of individual households living in single family duplex and townhome communities is frequently higher. How the economy has changed drastically in the last two decades with shopping centers becoming lifestyle centers or centers of entertainment over traditional retail with office parks relocating to more densified urban centers from the traditional suburban or ex-urban office parks. A lesser need for abundant parking at office buildings with more and more employees working remotely with employees demonstrating a preference for walkability over having to drive everywhere. How cities are changing their zoning rules to allow for more flexibility and housing choices. How the costs of construction of both structured and surface parking have gotten so high that it has become an impediment to affordable construction. How online shopping has outpacing brick-and-mortar commercial enterprise. How ride-sharing has lessened the need and desire for some to own cars. What an excessive parking provision, especially when it's free, induces more people to drive and increases traffic congestion. How globally population movements continue to move from rural areas to urban areas. How seniors and younger people are using less cars than they have in previous decades. And how new buildings are moving closer to the street to address pedestrian connectivity. Parking requirements throughout North America tend to be excessive and oftentimes there are many underutilized parking lots, particularly in suburbs and exurbs. Studies have shown that the codes became a reality and four times as many parking spaces as cars exist nationally. If the Empire State Building met typical municipal parking requirements, it would encompass 24 blocks. If Hudson Yards in Manhattan met Louisville, Kentucky's parking code, the surface parking lot would encompass 180 city blocks or the equivalent of 11 and a half Disney lands. It would displace 150,000 residents and 206,000 jobs and would take the average person about 52 minutes to walk across from end to end. This is from the city's code, chapter 27, table 123-1. The minimum requirements were adopted as arbitrary numbers that weren't necessarily based on technical studies of true parking need. Allow me to paraphrase an American engineer, Donald Shoup, who said in his book, The High Cost of Free Parking, that planners who set minimum parking requirements don't know how much parking spaces cost or how much they increase the cost of housing. They don't realize how parking negatively affects urban design and economic development and how parking greatly increases congestion and air pollution. This is a map of parking waivers, the location of recent parking waivers approved by the city. All but one of them is located in Midtown or our Midtown adjacent. This table is also in your backup. Here are the details of the selected waivers. Five are residential properties, six are commercial. With the exception of more space storage, which had a large variance supported by a valid parking study, the variances range from 2 percent to 26 percent. These projects are all built and their parking lots and or garages are fully functional. Staff observed these sites during daytime hours for commercial properties and during nighttime hours for residential properties and did not identify any parking deficiencies or facilities that were at full capacity. Amped Fitness is a tenant of this shopping center located at the northwest corner of Broward Boulevard and northwest 70th Avenue, which was originally built in 1979. They obtained a parking waiver of 17 percent because the fitness use in our code requires a certain amount of parking that was above and beyond the shopping center's parking capacity. Their parking study validated a lower need for their customers. With the mix of retail, restaurant, grocery and fitness uses, the reality demonstrates an overabundance of parking, both in the primary lot and behind the buildings, even though there are restaurants, medical offices and the grocery, which are uses that tend to have more customers than other types of commercial uses. In my 45 years as a plantation resident, I personally have never seen this parking lot full. The next slide displays an aerial view of the Broward Mall property. An analysis of pervious this versus impervious area was conducted for the adjacent extended stay and Barnes and Nobles properties and compared to the mall within the boundaries of the Ring Road. While the hotel and bookstore each have about 43 percent pervious area, the mall itself is less than 10 percent pervious, and most of that is within the eastern and northern perimeter landscape buffers along the major transit corridors. The mall has one of the proportionally largest parking lots of any property in the city and does not meet our current code regarding pervious area, which is the which leads to drainage issues. There's a few photos. The next two slides are photos taken back, taken on Black Friday of November of 2023, traditionally the biggest shopping day of the year heading into the holiday season. With the advent and prompt predominance of online shopping such as Amazon, the traditional shopping fiasco has diminished considerably. A study by Earth Economics was done to analyze the heat island effect within Broward County. While plantation is not considered a high risk area as compared to numerous areas in eastern Broward County, paved surfaces are a major contributor to this matter. We have all noticed higher temperatures in recent years. What are urban heat islands? To put it succinctly, an urban heat island is a metropolitan area that's a lot warmer than the rural areas surrounding it. And that's a definition from the National Geographic Society. As you know, the city was awarded the tree city designation once again and our motto is the grass is greener. We are a city that loves its trees and many of our residents rate this reality high on their reasons to live here. When designing site plans for construction, the two main conflicting issues are more parking versus more landscaping. This takes us to the present situation. The effects of more parking. More parking reduces open space and areas for shade trees. More parking increases the heat island effect. More parking worsens proper site drainage. More parking hampers economic development. More parking increases the cost of development. More parking impedes affordable housing. More parking affects urban design and site amenities. More free parking increases traffic congestion, air pollution, carbon dioxide emissions, and fuel consumption. Clearly, there are greater benefits to having more landscaping than parking. This is an existing property along Coral Way, also known as Miracle Mile in Coral Gables, another tree city. You can see a healthy mixture of provision for both pedestrians and motorists. Parking garages, parallel parking, valet parking, but also wide sidewalks and shaded areas and shaded areas and outdoor seating. Note that the parking here is not free. Here's a view of downtown Hollywood with its focus on wide sidewalks, pedestrian crosswalks, and landscaped medians. Another view of a mixed pedestrian vehicular condition, in this case Meisner Park in Boca Raton, with a wonderful open space in the middle of the mixed use buildings and plenty of parking options. In the future, we shall keep abreast of trends in society and technology and can further integrate elements to improve parking and street design. including complete streets principles. Numerous cities across North America have already eliminated their minimum parking requirements, either citywide or in certain areas of the city, such as downtown redevelopment areas. Note that there is a wide range of cities, including large urban centers, medium sized suburbs like plantation, as well as smaller towns. Many of these cities have excellent public transit systems, but not all of them do. Most of the councils and commissions have taken this step more and more of the sustainable, more and more of the sustainable development where we are and more of the sustainable development and affordable housing. and affordable housing as their primary reasons for adopting these policies more and more communities are shaping their future with transit oriented development also known as tods and inherent walkability you may recall at our october 26 comprehensive planning workshop where we talked about areas that were ideal for redevelopment particularly along our major corridors like broward and sunrise boulevards many cities are also freeing up underutilized parking lots for new development both publicly and privately owned which assists in economic development social vitality and provision for housing as the slide poignantly says looking for a place to live not to park many communities are also reducing free parking areas replacing them with parking meters or other payment systems which incentivizes more alternative modes of transportation and parking revenue is often used for improvement of sidewalks and other infrastructure as an example in hartford connecticut an underused park underutilized parking lot became a mixed-use neighborhood the city of atlanta adopted plans to improve midtown atlanta including integrating about 25 more acres of new green space into the city which had many desirable effects significantly this helped in lowering the overall temperature by about 14 degrees just through natural ecology if you lead with cars and traffic you get more cars and traffic so where do we want to go do we want to reduce parking requirements citywide or only in the redevelopment areas of midtown gateway and tod do we want to eliminate parking requirements citywide or only in those redevelopment areas or do we want to amend parking requirements to a hybrid code citywide or only in the redevelopment areas and this to explain this this is where we would reduce the minimums in some of the residential zones to a more realistic amount and require a maximum amount in the non-residential and mixed-use properties thank you thank you does any council members have any questions council member andrea not so much a question as just comments so i am in full support of reducing or eliminating the parking requirements what i'm not in support of is the paid parking the parking meters even though i agree with your statements and your research and thank you as council member horland said for all of the backup documents and articles but um so it definitely encourages walkability and bike riding but i also think it discourages some people um from you know going to that area especially with inflation and the prices you know increasing for already the goods and services and i'll give you the perfect example for me personally i used to always frequent los olas and the parking has gone up so much i mean not only is it paid meter parking or valet but it's pretty much doubled especially on you know those high peak friday night saturday night and so i just stay right here now and go to caloose and you know um unfortunately i'm not walking there yet it's a little far for the walk but uh you know i'll stay local because i'm really discouraged by the prices of the meters so that i i'm not supportive of i'm not there yet okay councilmember hornley thank you mr president i concur with my colleague uh councilmember andreu i am not i would not be for charging people to park in the city of plantation a couple of things like photos were great one photo i think was a little disingenuous which was a black friday at plantation walk because there are no shops there so you know that was um a a decision that the council had to make that was a difficult one because we eliminated the green space and the fountain when they were in the process of leasing and i relied on my former retail background understanding that in the state of florida especially 90 degrees people want to get in and out quickly if they're frequenting uh one of those restaurants or businesses so excuse me that was a difficult decision to add more parking and if you go there at night typically that parking if you've ever tried to pick a pizza uh try to find parking back there or go to taco craft or any of those restaurants so i think that picture was a little disingenuous but um that was a hard that was a hard uh vote for for many of us but having said that i think one of the um highest amount of complaints we got about plantation walk is a parking so my only concern would be and i i also agree with councilmember andreu about either eliminating or reducing the parking requirements i think the benefits far outweigh the negatives on that my concern would be if playing devil's advocate you have a developer who's coming in with a say multi-family and they're looking to build it lease it and turn it over they may not be as concerned in the long run about the lack of parking so my concern would be would those lowered costs definitely be passed on to the people who are leasing there so that would be my only concern if they're eliminated and i'd like to see how we could get around that okay thank you um i kind of feel like the pain for parking would be incumbent on more density because then it's kind of keeping people out and making the making the uh density support the businesses in there so i don't like seeing paid parking so i'm probably against paid parking but it does create an economic that make okay we're not going to drive there let's just all get in the uber or whatever um i kind of feel like eliminating the parking rules based you know this has been a long kind of uh progression a lot of conversations a lot of passionate advocates in our audience here tonight um but to go along with councilmember horland said being justified because are you know are they carpetbaggers or do they really want to invest in our city i kind of feel that people who are building retail um they're going to try to get that thing filled up they're going to show some kind of sustained um business in the retail and then turn it over they're not going to be able to sustain if it's not easy like you were uh councilmember anterio was saying to go there and um and i voted no on that fountain uh and getting rid of that fountain so i had it right for three years ago i'm not uh i'm not saying anything um okay i'm i'm all right um mr mayor thank you very much thank you for your detailed presentation and everything tell me about when cities converted to paid parking or if they converted to paid parking is that something the cities just did did they talk to the developer too what are the rights if a developer has all it's all the property builds something on their property puts up a parking garage and says we want to charge or we don't want to charge do we legally have a say so and not that do we have the entire say so or do we have only a partial say so i'll hang up and listen i don't think i can respond to the legal aspect of that um however i think it's a mix of those all those sometimes it's no any case study where you've done it and how it worked out no not offhand you'll get back to me right yeah i believe meisner doesn't charge parking and it's because of their agreement with the city if that's what you're asking and it leads me to las olas where she's saying which is the city most of those are city lots although i parked i've been burned before parking those asta lots where you walk in and it's up there and and they they sock you so you know caveat emptor but yeah council member horland just another question we often look to other municipalities to see if they've implemented this and how it has uh proceeded is there anyone else in broward county that you know that's completely eliminated their parking requirements no the only city in florida that i'm aware of is gainesville um i don't see any other comments from the council um is there anybody from one of the boards or committees mr duke i'm owen duke i'm on the the midtown board let me just give you a few thoughts on office parking which is often often overlooked right now the currents uh the current parking requirement is five places per thousand feet you can get a variance of that to build to put to put a hundred thousand square foot building up and put 500 people in it you would have a sweatshop and we don't have that in plantation we have an upscale market in plantation and so we don't need all of that a good example of a full building that that you know that is as close as it can get is the building that we just redeemed for um for the neptune society it's a 30 000 square foot building we had to put four and a half spaces per thousand and i had to move dumpsters to do it they the building is absolutely full of people and it's they've never filled the parking lot cornerstone has a four to one parking ratio and cornerstone is never filled their parking lot the cornerstone one has a two-story parking garage it's a huge thing no one's ever parked on the second floor for 20 years since i've been there cornerstone five which is the smaller building we had to get an exception and we got and the parking ratio there is 3.45 per thousand i've never ever ever filled the parking lot there's parking spaces there all the time they're only that building has been full forever there are only 2.7 people per thousand working in the building and so it it just doesn't need it on 8 000 peters road that does have a four to one parking uh parking uh ratio in in effect we have so much space left there that the marines do drills on one of the empty parking lots and they're excuse me it's 8 000 peters road is is uh uh you know the the the two uh office complexes that i mean apartment complexes that were built is right next to it and it's eight buildings there it's it's full all the time there's there's single ends and double there there's three to three double and and five singles but that's essentially it as far as paid parking this is a different type paid parking but paid parking for those the the we our competition is is is is las olas as far as parking our offices are concerned because we are next to las olas we're the best in brownwood county we can't we can't i can't sell paid parking for covered parking here and it's really and that's one of the big big big advantages that we have over las olas because when they go down with 15 employees they've got a they've either got to raise their salary or pay their parking one of the two and so it makes a big difference so look at that if anybody is interested i'll be glad to walk you through any of those and explain it and let you see it good thank you council member andrea one second just as you're approaching i wanted to also recognize i think mr auerbach came in after attendance was taken so thank you my name is mitch rosenstein uh i'm uh i'm here in two capacities i'm a member of the affordable housing advisory committee i'm also a developer of affordable and workforce housing throughout florida um thank you council and thank you staff for for tackling um this issue and for proactively addressing the question of just how much parking do we actually need um michael did a really good job of explaining how commuting commuting dynamics have changed and i agree with literally everything he said um from a developer's perspective there are a couple of um and and and other members of the ai can can speak to this too there are a couple of um considerations um first is the lack of developable land the lack of available land um really drives land prices up as you all know um and it means that we have to develop more vertically um so we have higher land costs and we have higher per square foot costs to build um and that's true whether you're building market rate apartments or offices or affordable or workforce housing the the same phenomenon is true um we also um have to be good stewards of subsidy and of sources when we're especially when we're developing affordable and workforce housing um and so if uh if we have to build a structured parking garage um let's say every space costs about 25 000 dollars per space and and concrete keeps getting more expensive somehow but let's say a parking garage might cost four million dollars to build that's four million dollars that were further away from being able to balance the budget or that's four million dollars that maybe we could have built more homes more affordable and workforce homes just to give you a little bit of perspective we have communities in miami-dade in fort lauderdale in st petersburg in mid-tier markets like lakeland in tertiary markets like in citrus county we are parking lots or garages for our infill developments are literally never filled literally never filled um the city of st petersburg is also proactively addressing this city of fort lauderdale is proactively addressing this we're working with a church in palm beach county unincorporated palm beach county we are going to be the case study our partnership with the church is going to be the case study for reducing parking requirements at that development right now they have code requirements of about two parking spaces for every unit for a family or for an individual who's earning 30 000 a year or 35 000 a year or for a retired couple or a single parent who's earning 45 000 a year um it's ridiculous to think that they have two cars right it's it's it's it's sort of ridiculous um and the trend especially in south florida is actually a ratio of less than one to one the parking study that we engaged for this community in palm beach county actually estimated about 0.65 parking spaces would be needed for every unit and that's unincorporated that's not really that close to public transportation as as as many nodes of public transportation as you have here in the city of of uh a plantation um so um just a few uh perspectives i i know other members of the ayak are here and and and i and i would imagine they'll have similar perspectives but um if you have questions about about costs about um phenomenon that we're seeing at other affordable housing communities i'd be happy and answer them thank you thank you mr cormann rob cormann with planning and zoning um can i don't you go ahead um so this has been an advertised meeting so if you're you're on one of these boards you are allowed to speak normally you're not allowed to speak we're under sunshine so we're in the sunshine right exactly so even though it's not outside um go ahead mr cormann thank you uh with regards to the issues of of parking i do believe that our our requirements are a little too high in many regards and all due respect councilmember horland when we go back to that one issue at with the fountain and those 36 spaces if you still go to plantation walk now and you go to the top floor of that parking garage it's never filled it's not full so of the 1200 plus spaces that you decided you wanted 36 more spots on right there yeah i have none of the humility that councilmember fadgen does i warned you against that because you were taking away some of those elements that will encourage the walkability and enjoyment of a space and replaced it with parking spaces which are simply meant for those people getting in and out and whether it was an economic decision to bring somebody like rock and bruise in or not misses the point of a space like that and as we move forward and we look at issues of redevelopment and exactly what is going on the nature of car ownership has changed the nature of transportation has changed and the number of parking spaces that we put in place as a requirement of development and then when we go and further give a variance to that it's setting up the wrong message because if we want people to walk if we want people to do everything else i'll bring you to cleary and pine island at the development there where again one of the recommendations that i made was that you require the developer to put in sidewalks on two sides of a single development and it was not considered that was back when you had your crutches um and it was used as an as an example there so what we have to do is not only look at the issue of parking but look at it holistically is what we want to do for movement in the city whether it is pedestrians whether it is bicycles whether it is cars because if we're going to go in the direction of some of the examples that mr alper put up there where you take a parking lot and you convert it into a mini neighborhood which is a potential on the broward mall spot whenever that gets redeveloped we have to think of it completely to include how people get back and forth so to your point for fort lauderdale it's too expensive to go there well you're not going there but you might uber there you might find a different way to get there what that means is putting a premium on the parking that forces people to choose how they're going to get from point a to point b and what we need to do is develop a code and develop a plan that includes all of that so that again and i've said this before when you all are not sitting on the dais but somebody else is they have the framework for what we want the city to be moving forward with regards to this problem so think of it a little more than just numbers of parking spaces but truly how you want to interconnect everything in the city to the rest of the county because we do sit in the middle of the county thank you thank you council member horland i just mr korman i don't disagree with that in totality but unfortunately this council did not approve that project so we were kind of retrofitting there my comment was not about the total amount of parking there but understanding the amount of complaints we get about accessibility and so a lot of people don't want to park in the parking garage and that's why it's not full so if you're running in to go pick up a pizza or you want to get to the restaurant that's why issues of accessibility though have to be considered when you were looking at how this thing is going to grow out from this point forward those 36 spots did not make or break that property it didn't make or break the property but it i believe made it easier for people who want to jump over to to pick up their pizza or go get ice cream and don't want to park in the parking garage especially a lot of our older folks no doubt about it however that parking lot does sit about 200 foot walk not the 56 the foot walk still not so the issue right but and that's where that's where you have to think of it in a more holistic way that is a small term loss for what could have been a long-term gain because people might have been willing to park in that parking lot and take the little longer walk knowing that they could sit there by the you know mr alpert i think along this conversation is we need to tighten up what our ordinances are for these temporary spots to pick up spots because it's it's it really irritates me i got to be honest with you um i turn that sign around when i park there that's that's a life hack when you go there you just park in the to go thing and you turn that that sign that feels going to fall on someone's car at some point but that's just me um and then you know i i think i said this mr holmes at one point that building should been pushed out it should have been 45 degree parking on the main street you would have got more cars in there and i can't remember a weekend i thought there was like a period of time they're only allowed to do it so many times it seems like every weekend those bars are up and you can't even drive down the main street so i i don't know if we'd have that in the code but like on a future development where we're dealing with these just things we need to i think we need to consider um you want to yeah no just to add that planning staff we talk about this all the time the reserve parking spaces and how that really messes up a lot of situations for a lot of the potential customers so okay we're trying to gather the feedback so that when we develop this ordinance yeah let's just keep learning from what we've been doing exactly thank you hi matthew mcintosh uh i'm an alternate on the planning and zoning board um i think something to consider uh for the entire vision is if we're putting the paid parking there or allowing that that density to build up one of the benefits is that it makes it a lot easier to just live on like kind of within walking distance of the area if we're talking about accessibility think of as someone who's in a wheelchair which i have a friend like that and for them every time when they hear about like the car dependency where it's like oh you know you know one of the biggest arguments for cars is that it's more accessible for people in wheelchair and she just like laughs and like how is that how can they even think that because it's like they can't drive a car and it's it the only reason why you don't see more people like with disabilities walking is because it's literally in hospital to walk but i did see a guy in uh forgot what you call those devices the assistant walkers crossing the intersection of 441 and brow boulevard like three weeks ago and it was just like it was like miserable it was just it was it was terrible and it was just like i was hoping the light doesn't turn green but there it was like so unsafe um but to get back on track what i'm saying is that the paid parking it's bad for people that are visiting plantation but for people that are living plantation it's really good i mean i've had uh lunches here throughout my time plantation working here and one of the most annoying things is that when we're eating and chilling at the kind of nearby brewery it's you get a person for a loud car with a loud engine revving their engine while we're trying to eat outside that isn't pleasant and i don't care if they had to pay for parking if they're coming from somewhere else and just driving through for a joyride so we gotta you know yes if you start getting complaints that hey parking sucks hey that's a good argument to litter and plantation the grass is greener here thank you max hi there max goldstein also a member of the planning and zoning board uh there's one thing that you know about me it's that i like to research and read things a lot and you've received some of my emails where they might better be described as full-length novels um but this is really a pretty clear-cut case of parking requirements aren't really a good thing for the city to pursue in the first place for it to be on our record books and there's a few different arguments to make here the first is that people are probably going to be scared that we're going to say we're taking away parking we're not we're just not requiring it and i think that mr fadgin actually hit this like right on the head with one of his comments where he was saying that um now i lost my train of thought right you're going to compliment me yes it's so easy to do sometimes but uh oh so so the developer still wants to be able to sell their property right like at the end of the day it's a business and if they don't provide enough parking for what they believe is is what the market's going for if they don't have enough parking for people to want to rent their building or have a business in their building they're not going to be able to sell their building so the developer is incentivized to provide the right amount of parking anyways whether or not the city requires it and in every city that i've seen across the country that does not require parking that took away their parking requirements the developers still provide parking it's just they don't provide an excessive amount of parking of course they want to save money i want to add something to what you said the buyer is going to have an idea of what the necessary parking is if they don't feel like the person is selling it so even if they're going to flip it there's that constraint and capitalism that right well this is not a good deal because they under under constructed the parking so i think there's a lot of it's a market nature things that would yeah it's a it's a self-regulating market and when the city has it in the code that we have to provide some minimum amount all that we're doing is putting an extra burden on the developer that they have to meet some standard or change the geometry of their building or they might have to put an extra investment that makes their project infeasible uh or they have to provide us with a parking study they're probably going to do the parking study anyways whether or not we require parking but now they have the extra step of hey we need to go to an extra city council meeting we need to go to an extra planning and zoning board meeting we need to hire consultants for extra hours of the day and it's just adding a big cost to the development whether or not we approve the variance or not i think we can implement this also that um staff can push back and say well you need to prove this to us like if if we feel like from our professional opinion not my professional opinion but our people in planning zoning thinks that it's not enough then we can push back to them and say well you need to prove this to us so i think that's something that could be incorporated and that's in the discussion went the full eliminate right and there are two other big points that i want to hit on the first is about affordable housing so there hasn't been a city in broward county that hasn't had parking requirements but the city of miami did for a time not have parking requirements and back in 2022 the city reinstated parking requirements in downtown brickland a couple of the neighborhoods at the behest of one of their uh city council members who's currently in a lot of trouble um and and what happened was that they had dozens of developments in the pipeline for affordable housing and then once the city reinstated their parking requirements all those affordable housing developments no longer penciled and they had to either cancel the project entirely or they have to change it to a complete market rate building and there's a very famous example of one developer whose name i'm forgetting but she was building a 17 unit affordable housing complex with six parking spaces in miami then miami reinstated reinstated parking minimums and she had to change the project from 17 affordable units to six market rate units to be able to meet the parking requirements so that's what that policy really does from an economic development side it kicks people out of our city and the second the last point i want to make is that uh people are rational intelligent creatures and they really respond to the environment that is set out for them so if you lead it was in the in the presentation if you lead with cars and parking you're going to get cars and parking the more parking that you provide the more people drive so when people start complaining about traffic and all this stuff the number one way to eliminate traffic is to i don't want to say make it harder to drive but disincentivize driving in plantation and you make it more walkable you make people more incentivized to take transit to take the bus to bike and it's it really starts from the parking policy um i think there's somebody else who would like to speak and we're yeah i'm done that was it for me thank you thank you we're probably going to go like an additional five minutes um since we have a little bit of a late start go ahead hi thank you my name is arielle denby berger and i'm on the planning and zoning committee which is a very diverse committee of opinions um we have um different factions and whatnot and i think it's very important that we recognize the state of florida has in its women's history month 51 of the population over is female and we're greatly underrepresented on committees and boards and i feel like i'm the voice of the working mother implantation and there's so many of us and just what the city council women have said um i don't want to live in fort lauderdale i don't want to live where there's floods and i have to pay for las solas um i work in fort lauderdale it's a nightmare i took my 10 year old to a play at the broward center for us to go to dinner i had to park and pay for parking for us to go the tickets were astronomical and then on top of that i had to pay for parking it was not enjoyable i you want me to spend money in our community you want me to live in our community you want families in our community you want us in our schools well we have to be able to park and we have to be safe and i will tell you as a woman i am not parking on the top floor of that parking lot at night and in our target here a few years ago um i was pulling into a spot and i guess i didn't realize because sometimes i can be oblivious with driving that someone else thought that they were getting to that spot i'm in the car my daughter was three at the time in the back seat and this man starts pounding on my window screaming i called plantation police they came out and it was very very scary my daughter kept saying the bad man the bad man i want to go to target with my kids and yes i understand that we have to be moderate about this we don't want tons of parking but we also can't be radical about this and become fort lauderdale we are not for lauderdale we are a family community and i just want you to remember that there are moms and dads with children who have to go to target and get diapers and they don't really are i'm not going to pay for parking to run in and get diapers i mean that is ridiculous so you are going to lose the families in this community as well as the elderly community as well because again they need to run in and also i think a problem too is we need to have some enforcement for if you're going to a lot of people who have disabilities or elderly will do the grocery pickup and so there's a designated spot for you to park for pickup and people are like oh it doesn't matter no it does someone could be handicapped someone could be elderly we should be able to go in that and that is for that short