City Traffic Commission - Regular Meeting

To order. And then we'll move on to item 1.1, which is the pledge allegiance, which you can all rise. I'll be leading tonight. Put your right hand over your heart. Ready to begin. 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. Great. Thank you. Go ahead and call roll.

We'll begin roll call. Vice Chair Ritchie? Here. Commissioner Barbato. Present. Commissioner Hamilton. Here. Commissioner Georges. Commissioner Chavarria. Commissioner Redding. Present. And Chair Felice.

I'm here as well.

A quorum is present with Commissioner Georges and Commissioner Chaviria absent.

Great. Thank you. With that, we move on to item 4.2 which is public comments. At this time, members of the public may address the commission on matters not listed on the agenda, which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the commission, provided that no action may be taken on off agenda items unless authorized by public law. Comments are limited to three minutes.

Do we have any speakers on off agenda items? Seeing none, we will move on to item 3.1, which is approval of the minutes of the Orange Traffic Commission regular meeting held on 04/09/2025. Alright. We have the first and the second. I'll go ahead and call for the motion.

With that, the motion passes unanimously. We'll move on to Item four point zero, which is new business and we'll start with Item 4.1. And we have the report, please.

Good evening, Chairman and members of the traffic commission. Item 4.1 is for the request of Blue Curb along the frontage of 1025 Chelan Avenue. The city received a request from a resident asking for Blue Curb along the frontage of Chelan Avenue to help provide a convenient curbside parking space for them and their care providers to park. The thousand block of Chelan Avenue is situated between Cambridge Street and Gardiner Drive and consists of single family residential properties. The property has a driveway which is utilized by multiple caregivers rotating throughout the home daily.

The resident has provided substantial evidence demonstrating the need for blue curb parking spot on the street adjacent to their home, including to accommodate an access OC van for pickup and drop off services. The site sketch illustrates the proposed installation of 22 feet of blue curb along the frontage of 1025 Chelan Avenue. Approval of this request will provide a designated location for individuals with disabilities to embark and disembark onto a vehicle. It should be noted that blue curb is still public parking and any person with a disabled plaque card or plate on their vehicle may use the curbside parking. If approved, the installation of the blue curb is for five years.

At the end of the five years from installation, the proponent will need to submit a written request to the city traffic commission to review the approval of a five year extension. The proponent shall modify the city in the event that the blue curb is no longer necessary. Staff recommends the traffic commission approve the request for blue curb along the frontage Of 1025 Chelan Avenue. This concludes my report, and I am here to answer any questions at this time.

Great. Thank you. Alright. Are there any questions for staff at this moment? Seeing none, we'll go ahead and open the public portion of this. Are there any speakers? Seeing that there are none, we'll go ahead and close the public portion. Any other discussion on this?

Any

go ahead.

So I I did drive by the property, and the the driveway would appear to me like it's an extra wide driveway. So it does look like it would fit maybe two and half cars in the driveway, and it does look like there would be an opportunity for the homeowner to expand the driveway to potentially fit three. You know, my only concern with this, when I drove by, there was ample space for parking in the neighborhood. And so my question is, so the the workers that are coming, if this is painted blue, would they be able to park here, or would they have to go park in front of other people's homes then?

The caregivers and the access OC van would be able to park here.

Okay. Was there any notification that went out to the rest of the neighbors then for for the blue curb?

Yes. We sent notification letters to a 300 foot radius.

Perfect. Okay. That's it. That's all my questions. Great.

Thank you. Any other questions? Seeing none, I'll go ahead and move it. We can get a second. Commissioner Rikki seconds. Go ahead and call for the votes. With that, the motion passes unanimously. We'll move on to item 4.2, which is the consideration of the request for permit parking on both sides of East Via Lardo Avenue from South Hugh Street to the easterly oh, that's a good word. Term terminus?

Item 4.2 is a request to implement permit parking on both sides of East Villalardo Avenue from South Hughes to the easterly terminus. The city received a request from a resident of Vialardo Avenue asking for permit parking to be considered on their street. The proponent explained an increase in demand for on street parking has grown in recent years and believes it originates from outside the neighborhood. The neighborhood permit parking program requires that 75% of curbside parking must be utilized at time of observation. Using the dates and time provided by the resident, staff conducted parking occupancy studies.

The first table shows the results of these studies. As you can see, Villa Lardo exceeded the 75% threshold. Staff then circulated petitions to residents on Villa Lardo Avenue. The neighborhood permit parking program requires 75% support for permit parking to be considered. The second table shows a result of the petition process with Villalardo achieving the required support.

The aerial illustrates the proposed permit parking limits on Villalardo based on the occupancy study and petition results. As a reminder, the neighborhood permit parking program does allow property owners on the adjacent street experiencing spillover to request a permit parking process be initiated within one year without having to pay the application fee. However, parking occupancy, petition thresholds and any other requirements in effects would still apply. Staff recommends the traffic commission approve the request for permit parking on both sides of Villalardo Avenue and forward this to City Council for final action. This concludes my report and I am available to answer any questions at this time.

Great, thank you. Any questions for staff? Seeing none, we'll go ahead and open the public portion. Any comments on this one? Yep. Okay, Chavez. If you can make your way up to the podium. If you can come up to the podium, it'd help us out a lot.

I have a question. I live another site, student is siloed, and I have the same situation.

If you want, after the meeting, you could speak with staff and they'll explain to you the process. Yes. Okay. Great, thank you. Any other comments on this item? Seeing none,

we

will go ahead and close the public portion and bring it back to the Commission. Any additional questions? Thoughts? Entertain a motion? Second?

We have a first and a second. We'll go ahead and call for the vote. With that, the motion passes unanimously. Alright, we'll move on to item 4.3, which is a request for permit parking. On both sides of Excuse me, hold on. I messed up my notes here. Request for permanent property on the East Side Of South Swindler Place from East Chapman Avenue to East Almond Avenue, and both sides of East Almond Avenue from Swindler Place to South Olympia Way.

Item 4.3 is a request to implement permit parking on the East Side Of Swindler Place and both sides of Almond Avenue. A resident on South Swidler Place submitted a request to initiate the process for permit parking on Swidler Place. Due to its proximity to the existing permit parking area I and Swidler Place, Almond Avenue was included in the permit parking evaluation. The limits for evaluation are shown in the area map above. The neighborhood permit parking program requires that 75% of curbside parking must be utilized at the time of observation.

During the dates and times provided by the residents, staff conducted parking occupancies. The first study the first table shows the results of these studies. As you can see, both Swidler Place and Almond Avenue exceeded the 75% threshold. Staff then circulated petitions to residents on Swidler Place and Almond Avenue. The neighborhood permit parking program requires 75% votes in favor for permit parking to be considered.

The second table shows the results of the petition process with Swidler Place and Almond Avenue achieving their required support. The aerial illustrates the proposed permit parking limits on Swidler Place and Almond Avenue based on the occupancy study and petition results. As a reminder, the neighborhood permit parking program does allow property owners on the adjacent street experiencing spillover to request a permit parking process be initiated within one year without having to pay the application fee. However, parking occupancy petition thresholds and any other requirements in effect would still apply. Staff recommends the traffic commission approve the request for permanent parking on both sides of Baldwin Avenue and the east side of Swindler Place and forward this to city council for further action.

This concludes my report, and I'm available to answer any questions at this time.

Great. Thank you. Any questions for staff? Seeing none, we'll go ahead and open the public portion. Any speakers? Second to switch screens again. Kelly Bingle?

Hi there. I actually live off of Burley, and with regards to the permit parking, a lot of people, especially on Almond, actually moves into our street and the street next over because they don't want to pay for the permit parking. So how do we prevent them from coming over to our street because it clogs it, and then we can't park our own vehicles in front of our homes? Or, can we get permit parking on Burley And Washington to prevent that?

So, to answer your question, after the meeting, talk with staffs and certainly adjacent street. They can explain to you the process. We wish we had a really good answer for where the cars go when we if we do permit parking here.

Need to be

protected too because then we won't be able to park in front of our streets. There we've had multiple incidences where the people on Almond would say, why pay taxes? They're talking about sales taxes, not, you know, state taxes or city taxes or homeowners taxes, and it's like it's not fair to us that can't park in front of our own homes because we have multiple, you know, vehicles for our homes. We have children. We have teenagers.

We have future children who's going to be getting, you know, vehicles that our cars are only fit so many on our properties, you know. So just that's just something to consider with the permit parking there. Like, we should be authorized to get permit parking or some kind of statement saying that our properties should be protected so that we can park in front of our own homes. Yeah. Thank you for that.

You're very welcome.

Alright. Any other speakers? Seeing none, we'll go ahead and close the public portion, bring it back to the commission for any additional questions or considerations. And we're first. Do we have second?

Commissioner Hamilton, thank you. With that, I'll go ahead and call for the vote. With that, the motion passes unanimously. That, we will move on to item 4.4, which is consideration of time limits and curb restrictions related to paid parking in Old Town.

And, mister chair, I'll be recusing myself from this item due to a conflict of interest.

Perfect. Thank you Commissioner Ike.

Mister Tae. Yes, sir. Mister chairman, members of the, traffic commission. The last item for your consideration tonight involves parking and curb use restrictions in and around the eight square blocks closest to the plaza, kind of highlighted on the map on the right side of your screen. As you know, the city council recently approved a paid parking program within these eight square blocks.

A number of related activities are currently in progress to implement that program including procurement of a parking operator, purchase of equipment, setting up mobile pay, and integrating all these components together with our police department citation management system. But, however, for paid parking to achieve the desired effect of increasing turnover for local businesses, it needs to be supplemented with time limits and actively enforced. In addition, there are a mixture of land uses in Old Town that require provision of a cargo and passenger loading zones, and the council authorizes, city traffic mission to review and approve curb management restrictions for this area. And to be clear, this agenda item is limited only to the curb management component of the program. So before we talk about the proposal, a little bit about the existing conditions.

While there are already time restrictions on many streets and city lots within the paid parking footprint, These restrictions do have some limitations. Number one, they don't cover necessarily the entire footprint of the paid parking area. They have varying allowable time increments. As you can see, a combination of one hour or two hour, thirty minutes, fifteen minutes, some of which may have been legacy installations that no longer represent the best use of the city's curb space. They have varying effective times that could be more efficient if made uniform.

And further, there are 10 loading zones within the paid parking footprint, some of which appear to be no longer needed or it could be rendered more functional with a few modifications. So some goals for the curb management plan, you know, in developing what I'm about to show you, the following objectives we had in mind kind of to the extent possible. Number one, use existing conditions as as a point of departure, cover the entire paid parking footprint, align the effective times of those restrictions with the times that paid parking has been approved for, achieve consistency in the time increments to promote promote better driver understanding and simplify the enforcement process, and identify and address legacy installations that are no longer optimal. And finally, allow for post implementation modifications based on feedback, experiences, feedback that we get from motoring public and the businesses of any observed needs as they evolve in the field after the program goes live. So in terms of the curb management plan, there's two components, time limits and loading zones.

So for the time limits, the idea is to standardize the time limits to two hour parking on city streets and three hours in in city parking lots. In both cases, aligning the effective hours with the paid parking program which is from 9AM to 6PM, Monday through Sunday. And again, this would apply to all streets and lots in the paid parking footprint. Generally, areas marked in green on this map. There's also the loading zones and so similar to existing these are going be similar to existing conditions, what's already out in the field with a few minor changes.

What you don't see on the map were three loading zones on Orange Street that have since been removed. Those appear to be legacy installations again that are are no longer optimal based on the adjacent land uses. The remaining seven loading zones are shown on this exhibit with cargo loading zones numbered one through four, passenger loading zones lettered A through C. We extended the Lemon Street cargo zone, which is number four from I think 35 feet to 80 feet, but just to give it more functionality for some of the delivery trucks and modified the passenger loading zone on Olive Street in front of the senior center, is Loading Zone B, to be effective only Monday through Friday rather than also on weekends because the senior center is closed. Lastly, this set of restrictions really is intend intended to enable the park the paid parking program to move forward.

It doesn't preclude future changes that might become necessary necessary or desirable in the future. With that, staff recommends approving the curb restrictions describing the staff report along with the Associated Traffic Commission resolution, and I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

Great. Thank you, Mr. Tsai. Anyone have questions right off the bat? I do wanna thank staff for putting this together. I know this is a tremendous amount of time to walk this probably multiple times and ensure that the best use outcome was there. So I do want thank staff for spending the time doing that and taking into consideration. I don't have any other questions. I think it's pretty straightforward. So with that, I will go ahead and open the public portion of this.

I assume there's quite a few speakers. Before we do get to the first speaker, I just want to remind everybody here, we won't be addressing paid parking. It's not under our purview. We also won't be addressing any permits that may be issued in conjunction with that. Our purview is only for the timed portion and the curb restrictions. Okay? Probably, I think, six speakers, so we'll leave it at the three minute time frame. With that, we'll move to Bill Bland first and then on up after Bill, we'll have Julie Turner.

Hello. I represent Sunlight Christian Center in Orange and we are at Maple And Glacelle. Part of what I wanted to talk about are exactly the things you don't want to talk about, which is the permit and the possible, the pay portion. We totally understand what you guys are trying to do with turning over parking just like a table in a restaurant needs to turn it over to be able to continue revenues coming and we don't oppose that. That's not a problem for us. We totally get it. Our issues are just a little bit of we don't wanna be negatively impacted by this. We are not a restaurant. We're not a shop. We're a church.

We're the only church in the area that's affected by this as far as I can tell, and we have our parishioners that are coming, they come we've got about a 150 people that are probably would be negatively affected by having no carve out or accommodation for them. I know that's not exactly what you wanna accomplish right now, but I need to tell you. And with that, with those 150 people, they also bring, patronage to the restaurants, to the shops. They come, they stay. We're looking for something that maybe accommodates Sunday morning from 09:00 to noon, something along those lines that might make it not so punitive for those people who come and the staff that run the church.

So all of those people are looking for a place to park. They're trying it's already you know, I've been going to the church since I was 15 years old. The church is 50 years old this year, so we've been there for a long time. We offer free services like free Friday night movies. We do free real estate classes on there.

We have a food bank on Saturday mornings across the street at one of our other properties. So we're trying to be good neighbors, we're trying to be adding to the community and we're looking for just some kind of accommodation that would make this not so much of a problem because you know as well as I do that human nature says if going to this church becomes too much of a hassle or an expense because you're having to pay for parking, you're gonna find somewhere else to go. And with that also are those dollars for people that are having breakfast before church or going to lunch afterwards or shopping at any of those other things. So we don't wanna negatively affect anything. We love Orange, we love being a part of it, we really appreciate you listening to us and we're looking for some kind of thing that might make it a win win for everybody if we can do that.

Okay. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Julie? And after Julie, have Jennifer Martinez.

Hello. I am here to talk about the parking the permit parking related to I'm res I live at the flats, and we have no parking already. So if we put the metered parking there, then there's no place for us who live there, which there's quite a few of us. There's no place for us to park at all. So that's what I'm here to talk

carve out for the residences. Correct?

Yes. Mister mister chairman, just briefly. The the the ordinance that was approved does allow for residential permit parkings for for residents of of mixed use buildings such as the flats. As we get closer to implementation, we'll be working with our parking operator to develop a process by which residents can obtain those permits.

Okay. Thank you.

You're very welcome. After Jennifer, have Gabriela Garcia.

Hi, everybody. It's my first time speaking in a council meeting, I might be a little nervous. But I am also with the flats, a resident. I've been a long time resident over ten years of the flats, and I've been a long time resident in Orange. And, I also have issue with the parking and I'm concerned about not being able to get a permit parking because what I've heard up until today was that it was not being considered.

So I just wanted to give you a little context to maybe I'm newly retired, so there's no way I can afford a parking meter with two out $2 for ten hours a day. So, I mean, that would end up being more than my rent. So, would be very hard on me and a lot of the other tenants it's hard on as well. But I do understand the city's need to increase revenue, but I just wanted to ask that you keep us in mind and consider us and give us the option to have parking tickets. The parking structure is inconvenient for me because I am pretty much home 20 Fourseven and I do have grandchildren and I cannot park in the parking structure 20 Fourseven because it closes at nighttime.

If I need to leave for any reason, I can't get out. So the parking structure is a no go for me, but if you could come up with other areas, that would be great. I think that's pretty much all I have to say is I just want to make sure that we're heard and that you do consider that that you give us opportunities to do parking permits and stuff like that. Thank you

very much. Thank you. All right. Gabriela?

Good evening, Chairman, Commissioners, and City Staff. My name is Gabriela Garcia and I'm here on behalf of LCP Tracker, a SaaS technology company that has proudly operated in Old Town Orange for over ten years. We occupied two office buildings at 117 And 201 East Chapman Avenue located directly across from each other in the heart of the plaza. We currently employ between 80 and a 100 professionals and that number is expected to grow. Our team continue contributes daily to the local economy, not just through our business operations but by actively supporting the community.

Our employees regularly buy lunch, grab coffee, shop, and bring family members to enjoy Old Towne Orange. Many of our employees also commute long distance work here and they rely on consistent affordable parking to make that possible. With the proposed pay parking program, we respectfully ask, how will this program accommodate businesses like ours with a large number of employees who need reliable long term parking to do their jobs. We operate on varied work schedules including hybrid full time on-site and four ten shifts. Could the city consider offering an employee parking discount or group rate for local businesses?

For employees with disabilities who require close access, how will the city ensure that the accessible parking remains available, convenient, and affordable? We're also concerned about capacity. The current free parking structures in Old Town Orange already struggled to meet demand. They will not be able to accommodate all of our employees plus the many other workers and tourists who visit the area daily. Daily. Finally, we must consider the financial impact. An employee working full time on-site could be spending $50 per week or 200 per month just to park. That's a significant cost burden especially for those managing tight budgets. We support the city's goals of improving parking turnover and visitor access. At the same time, we hope the city will also consider the needs of local employers and their teams who help keep Old Town Orange vibrant every day.

We are eager to collaborate and work with the city to find a solution that supports Orange growth while also respecting the financial realities of our employees. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Great. Thank you. Anybody else like to speak on this item before we close the public portion? Seeing none, we'll go ahead and close the public portion and bring it back to the commission for any further discussion, any further questions? We're happy to entertain a motion as well.

Second? I'll go ahead and second it. Before we call for the vote, we understand that this is potential for corrections in this. This is the first step in this phase. But I believe this is a good launching pad for this program and we can continue to modify the times and curbs as needed as this commission and council see fit.

I think this is a great great starting point. With that, I'll go ahead and call for the vote. With that, the motion passes unanimously with Commissioner Ricci accusing himself. With that, we'll move on to item five point zero, which is adjournment. That's it. Thanks everyone.