Parks & Recreation Board - Regular Meeting

Yes.

Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Okay. Perfect. Okay. So just make sure we have it on the record. Derek Redblum was an I. Brian Franks was an I. Yes. Benjamin Pat.

I.

Bobby Manny. Jose Urbiza.

Dan Alden.

And then Mitch, I'm going to leave you upstate.

I'll do upstate. Okay.

All right. Motion passed. Now our new chair.

Congrats. Welcome back. Yeah, you know, I value everybody's opinion. And there's a very diverse diversity of opinion here for sure. I'm a past chair. Of this of this. Committee, so, you know, it's a, and it was a, it was a real enjoyment for me to do this. I came back on the board is to take part in it. it's going to be end up being sure again so but that's fine uh so but anyway look that's the main thing i i value everybody's opinion so and you'll everybody will get their chance so okay where am i going okay that's uh nominations for vice chair if necessary

So we don't have to because this term is still until we do this next time.

Okay.

So that's good. Yeah. So we can just postpone this one indefinitely. Okay. Unless you don't want to be vice chair.

I'm okay with it.

So we can just postpone this one indefinitely. We just need a motion and a second.

Yeah, I move that we continue Ben Pack as vice chair of the Parks and Rec Board.

Second. Second.

That was his name.

Okay. Then I will call.

Mitch Hoffman.

Yes.

Dan Alden.

Yes.

Derrick Griblin.

Yes.

Bob Beaman.

Yes.

Brian Frank.

Yes.

Jose Ufizo.

Yes.

You can motion pass.

Ready for the presentation. Yes, sure.

Yes, receive an update from an Eagle Scout candidate, Asher Pregnell, regarding his completed project installing interactive geology along the trail in Upper Purgatory Creek Natural Area. And Asher, we will bring your presentation up and you'll just tell us next slide, OK?

OK, I clicked on the wrong one.

Give me one second.

Get out of there. Yeah. I'm trying to get in here with this one. I'm sure we should.

One moment. Right there, this is where I came to be. We're going to get there.

OK, can you guys see the presentation online? Yes.

Thank you. We're ready for you and just let me know when I need to switch a slide up.

You can go ahead and go to the next slide. OK. So for you that don't know me, my name is Ash Pringnell and I'm from the local troop 1954. March 26, I was given permission to begin work on the project and the website. The project was installing signposts with a QR code that leads to geological information about Upper Purgatory Creek. And I installed one of those near the trailhead and one of those down in the grotto.

Skip to the next slide.

It was completed on July 6. They each signpost has 3D printed QR code in each side. Our concern that was brought up was people putting fake QR codes on the actual QR codes on the signpost for people to click on those. So what we did, we 3D printed them with a thick layer so people cannot put on fake QR codes on top of that.

I think the next slide.

So this is a QR code that we installed on each signpost. If you would like to view the website, that should link directly to it. Y'all can check that out now. Timu, what? I'm about to have a mild panic attack.

That's the wrong QR code, isn't it?

For those who didn't.

It's it's a run through of the geology in the area and it tells you where to look and what what to look for and how it was formed. What? What processes were included in that? All that fun stuff and safety while going down there, because that has been a concern.

Next slide.

There we go. So this is the preparation. So the first photo is the 3D printing of the QR codes. The second photo is a preparation at the Upper Purgatory Creek Trailhead site.

And next slide.

These are prepping signposts. I cut a eight foot posts in half at a 45 degree angle and painted the tops and sealed them, then drove rebar through the bottom to make sure nobody can pull the posts out of the rocks that they're setting.

Next slide.

This is the installation. This was down in the grotto. We hiked the materials in, which was supposed the buckets to carry the rocks in and the chicken wire. And then we placed the chicken wire on the ground, put a flat rock on the bottom of the post, put the post in, put rocks all around it.

And next slide.

These were the completed signposts. The first one and the last one are at the top near the trailhead and the one in the center is down at the grotto.

The next slide.

So we, we, the Texas State Geology Club, Professor Wernette from the University, St. Mark's Green Boat Alliance, Trip 1954, and me, want to thank you so much for your support we were able to accomplish installing both these signposts on time with no issues at all on july 6. so thank you i wonder did you did you did you ever think about putting something on there that this is a an eagle scout project So what we're currently doing is we're looking at different plaques, customizable plaques that we can put my name, partnerships, and the Eagle Scout and the troop number and just nail it directly onto that post.

I think to me that would be less likely to be vandalized if it's an Eagle Scout project anyway. So hopefully it never does. Thank you so much. Good job. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Receive a presentation and hold discussion regarding a recommended resolution from the parking advisory board outlining proposed new parking management strategies for downtown San Marcos. The parking advisory board chair, Mr. John David Carson, that's going to be presenting to us.

Thank you, Chair and Director Case. Yes, we have our presentation, so I'll wait for that to come up. While I do, I also want to acknowledge we have a lot of backup support here as well. So my colleagues on the committee, who are also on the board, who are also part of the Outreach Committee, Gabi Moore and Jovan Marine, and lots of great folks from staff, public works, as well as the Marshal's Office to help answer questions as needed. We're sorry for inundating your packet, but I know that our 100-page something document was in there. This is intended to be a little bit more digestible summary of that information. It is still pretty detailed. So if at any point in time you want to pull a hook on my neck and give me the next slide, just give me the hand signal and we'll do it. So with that, we can go ahead and jump in. So I know that this board probably has a better grasp on this than maybe some, but just to start with what a parking benefit district is. So this is not a concept that's unique to San Marcos. In fact, we don't have any yet, bit of a spoiler, but it's a specific geographic area within a city. For example, here it could be downtown, the river park system, et cetera, where excess parking revenues are sequestered and used only to improve that district. So it's generally most effective where parking demand is exceeding the amount of parking supply that you all have. I know this board's familiar with that conundrum. And it's really a proven best practice for connecting what's really a private use of a public asset, so someone parking their private vehicle in the public space, which could be used for a variety of other public tasks, and creating a public benefit specifically back into that district from that activity. To be very clear and not to be a bleak about it, paid parking is almost always a component of a parking benefit district because you have to have some revenue sourced in order to make it make sense. Next slide. So in terms of why create a parking benefit district, I think we kind of, you know, maybe started to already hit some of these points, but, you know, per the city's ordinance, which we'll talk about, excess revenues can be used to do things like improve parking supply, make it more efficient with wayfinding technology implementations, also enhancing the public realm, safety lights, streetscapes, sidewalks, landscaping, maintenance itself, and then also bolstering other transportation modes like walking, rolling, transit, things that will reduce the parking demand on an area if people arrive via those modes. Also, it can create a self-sustaining fund for enforcement and parking management. We'll talk a little bit about what the city's current circumstances are in that regard. And in that way, it can actually relieve some pressure on the city's general fund from having to subsidize parking operations by self-funding itself from the district. however to be clear a parking benefit district is not a mechanism to generate funds for the city to use wherever i know the city has budget issues which which are important to think about this is not that solution uh at least not directly um in terms of generating funds that the city is going to spend on other other items next time please So the parking advisory board, what do we do? These are pretty much directly from our bylaws and the ordinances. So we recommend policies for on and off street parking rates, codes and ordinances. We advise the city manager council on both parking and transportation demand management. We provide guidance on those programs and infrastructure within parking benefit districts, and we develop guidelines and oversee the use of parking benefit district funds to support. Interestingly enough, in our charge, parking benefit district is mentioned all over the place. We currently do not have any parking benefit districts in the city of San Marcos. So when it was formed, it was contemplated that we would, but that's not been activated yet. We've been very busy, but doing other things. Next slide, please. So about being busy, I'm going to try not to tick through each of these, but we can return if you would like. But I do think it's important to start sort of in 2013, Kinley Horn, which is a national engineering consultancy, did a study for the city on parking, very expensive one, and recommended paid parking downtown. The City Council decided not to take any immediate action with that, but in June of 2018, Kim Lee Horn came back with a new study which provided a framework which recommended creating a parking advisory board, hiring a parking manager, creating parking benefit districts, and creating an enterprise fund to essentially manage those revenues. And quickly, in December 2018, council created the parking benefit district. And then there was a thing called COVID. There were some other activities, you know, startup that were needed. But by 2022, there started to be some action taken. I will go through all of these in detail, but I think we can come back if you would like. We have gone through as a parking advisory board prior to my terms. This is a Royal Weave. and done a lot of the things that were suggested to improve conditions. And I think there have been some pretty demonstrable results. From a citation collection rate, our numbers are still not great for a municipality, but when in 2022, on average, it was about 40% of tickets ever were paid by the city. One important thing to know is that city, which you all may know, city parking tickets are civil infractions. They're not criminal infractions like a traffic violation would be. And so there are some limitations in terms of how aggressively you can get people to take serious consequences, but there are a lot of levers that can be pulled. That has improved through a variety of different things up to about 65% in 2026. However, I will say we've somewhat plateaued around that number without some additional probably changes. So next slide, please. And we can always come back and go through some of those details. So our objectives, I should have, I guess one detail I should have mentioned, you don't need to go back, but it was that in 2024, city council did authorize and ask the parking advisory board to study downtown paid parking again. So we created a committee and then reported back over a lengthy two-year period on our findings. So we didn't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars this time, but we did, we were slow because we're volunteers. So y'all know how that goes, I'm sure. Our charge is where it's basically actually name and identify the issues and clarify what our objectives were. I think everybody has some anecdotal sense of what they think is going on, but we really wanted to put it down on paper, document what those conditions were, and then develop a recommendation. This is a very short preview of what we're going to go into in detail, but unsurprisingly, our recommendation is to create a downtown parking benefit district, invest 100% of those excess revenues in downtown, Generally maintain the free parking paradigm that we currently have, but add paid options for longer stays. Currently, almost everywhere in downtown, it's two hours that you can park for free, and then you have no other option of getting a ticket or playing some games or leaving. So we want to change that and add that paid option. Through this, we want to prioritize city residents, much like you all have with your parking actions, and downtown employees, and protect at-risk citizens. So we know there are citizens that have socioeconomic challenges in the city. How can we try to do our best to not exacerbate those and really maybe alleviate some that we are creating right now with the penalty-only structure? And then expand parking personnel and enhance our technology we can't staff has done amazing work so far there's only a limited number of them we would need some more staff and i think parks probably feels like we may need some more parking staff as well um even to manage the activities you all are involved in so i will propose an implementation timeline and we can share and solicit feedback so that's what we're doing today issues we have again 100 page report we can dive into all these issues and our objectives but just to kind of name them limited on street parking availability is number one we have chronic overstaying of posted time limits um downtown san marcos is really not all that unique uh we like to give ourselves you know exceptionalism but we do we'll acknowledge that there's some external on-street demand pressures that we have downtown from the university is also uh from employees that don't necessarily have uh parking accommodated for them by employers that are using the on street spaces as opposed to residents and visitors and things of that nature um we do have loopholes and limited consequences which i spoke to a little bit before misaligned public expectations this is really more of a national issue you know i mean the way most of america is is you drive into a big power center with seas of parking and it's free and you walk in and there's less urban areas where that is not a reasonable expectation. You know, when you're going into a walkable core, when you have a lot of people together, if everybody's bringing their own car and parking for free, geometry just doesn't allow that to work. So we'll probably have some improvement to do in terms of communication. Parking inequity and municipal burden. The parking inequity part is that we have a lot of people parking downtown that are just kind of stuck in a i'm getting a fine i'm getting a citation i'm getting a ticket because they don't have another good option because they need to be there for more than two hours for some sort of reason and that generally tends to in fact folks that maybe have a little bit um you know less uh economic uh ability to to to pay um those larger fees whereas maybe a smaller rate would be uh more achievable and then municipal burden we're getting into this a little bit more but the city general fund is actually subsidizing the free parking downtown right now because There's not enough money collected from citations alone to cover expenses. And really, we're falling short in some of our enforcement because we don't have any more funds to hire personnel, et cetera. The other thing to keep in mind about an enforcement state is if you have great compliance and you have less tickets, you need more people to do that. That's expensive. And if your only source of funding is those tickets that you no longer have because you have great compliance, you've kind of made a circular problem for yourself. And then lastly, just technology limitations and deployment conflicts. Our parking operations have gotten a lot more sophisticated on the back of the Parks Department's efforts, et cetera, but we still have some conflicting systems and some opportunities to improve that. At the heart of it, over-occupancy of on-street parking spaces is the core issue. So these other things are coming from the fact that we have more people on the street than our space is generally available. 85%, that's floating up there. I'm going to continue to come back to that number. It's a very widely accepted industry target for on-street parking. 85% occupancy on a block. What that generally means is that there's one or two spaces available in every block. So if you're arriving to do business or go to a restaurant or whatever, you can feel like you have a place to park, but you still have very good utilization of that public asset. It's not, you know, vacant and being so. But once you exceed 85%, you really start to get into those issues of being over occupied. So we'll use that as a benchmark. Next slide. So looking at some of these existing conditions, the first comparison, just a place to start, is 2018, which is the last Kimley-Horn study. And then we'll talk about where we are, our current operations. We are focused on the afternoon weekday peak in this chart, because that's what Kimley-Horn really gave us in terms of comparison. So we'll look at other statistics here in a minute. But in 2018, overall occupancy of the downtown spaces, and there's approximately 800 in what we're calling downtown 70 of those were occupied at that time now that includes areas where they're far you know far away from the activities as well as the ones that are in the core so really when you experience over occupancy and you hear people complaining they experience it up on the block level so there are 19 blocks that were over occupied and that translates to basically 42 percent of the downtown Um, and the population, the city's daytime population estimates, by the way, are much higher than this, but we're going with the census since that's the most official, but was, you know, around 64,000. Um, and again, Kimlinghorn study was somewhat limited in the sense that it was just September and October, uh, uh, observations at 10, one and seven. And I think there was only maybe one in the seven. So we really didn't capture much information about, you know, occupancy. We were very much indebted, both the city staff, as well as Texas state's, uh, geography 43, 56 class, 356 class.