City Adopts New Parking Credits Program

The city will take a new approach to dealing with West Hollywood's parking problems after the Council voted unanimously to adopt a credits program at its Monday night meeting.

City zoning ordinances require businesses to have a certain number of parking spaces per 1,000 square feet of commercial space – 3.5 spaces for retail space, nine for restaurants and 15 for nightclubs.

In a city as built up as West Hollywood, many businesses can not meet those parking requirements on-site, so the city allows them to lease off-site parking.

City staff acknowledged during a presentation to the Council Monday that this off-site system is flawed, that it is “paper parking” rather than real parking since businesses are not required to make those leased spaces available for customer use.

Additionally, some property owners who lease spaces have been accused of double- and triple-dipping, leasing more spaces than are actually there.

Counting the number of parking spaces

Under the program, the city will count the number of parking spaces in a district—something the city has never done before. That includes parking decks, street parking and private lots available for public use. This count will be done every six months.

With this accurate count of the number of spaces, the city will then sell yearly parking credits to businesses that need to meet off-site parking requirements.

For example, if there are 1,000 spaces available in a district and a business needs 150 spaces to meet its zoning code requirements, the city would sell that business 150 parking credits, bringing the number of spaces in the pool down to 850.

Businesses will pay $375 per year, per space to buy a parking credit, which is considerably less than the $1,200 or more per year it pays to lease a single space.

The parking credits program will kick off in the Boystown area since there is plenty of parking available thanks to parking decks at the and the . If successful, the program will expand to other areas.

Initially, the program will only be available to new businesses or current ones that intensify their use. Existing businesses must still use lease spaces from private lots for the time being, but will be able to join the credits program if the test run works as city staff hopes it will.

Council comments

The council was impressed by the new plan since it will encourage economic development, especially of small businesses.  

Mayor John Duran called the idea “great,” lamenting that the city’s current parking situation is often a case of “the tail wagging the dog.”

“If often seems our economic development is contingent on parking availability rather than the other way around,” Duran said. “This is a great way to prioritize our goal, which is economic development, and do the parking attached to that rather than the other way around.”

Councilman John Heilman called the program “exciting,” but expressed concerns about the businesses getting automatic annual renewals of the parking credits.

Heilman said the business should be in good standing with the city, meaning no code violations, no serving minors alcohol and business licenses in proper order, before getting the renewal.

Public Works Director Oscar Delgado said if the parking credit was pulled prior to the business license issue being dealt with, the business would be in violation of its conditional use permit.

Councilwoman Abbe Land suggested that in such cases, the city could renew the parking credit for a limited amount of time until the business license issue was resolved.

The council directed staff to explore options for assuring the business is in good standing before getting a renewal.

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