Paving paradise properly in Palmer

April 5, 2005

KATE GOLDEN/Frontiersman reporter

PALMER - The city will swell: more people, more jobs, more downtown shops. Will there be more parking?

"There's a balance to be struck, paving paradise and putting up a parking lot," said Pastor Jonathan Rocky of the St. John Lutheran Church at the March 22 Palmer city council meeting. "It would be nice to do less rather than more."

The Lutherans are planning to renovate their church on Elmwood Avenue in Palmer, adding 5,000 square feet and using their property across Eklutna Street from their current building.

The original church was grandfathered in with no parking lot. Now, there's enough space to build a big lot, but they'd like to save some green space for a play area and gazebo.

Palmer code, Rocky told the council, will require 157 parking spaces.

The requirement is calculated on the auditorium and all the other rooms being full simultaneously, which he said is a rare event.

Anchorage code, according to the church architect, would require 109 spaces for the same building. The calculation is based only on a full auditorium. Could Palmer follow its example?

"I'm not saying that Anchorage is wiser than Palmer," Rocky said, "but it is worth consideration."

Council members agreed that the parking code could use some cleaning.

"I think that we need to initiate the process of change," council member Brad Hanson said, checking out the code.

City attorney Jack Snodgrass said he thought the code looked a little redundant.

Seating and floor space are only two categories in the parking calculation. Hanson suggested a more consistent revision could render it more fair and less confusing.

Another problem: The code is based on the idea that a building should provide parking for its maximum use.

"[It's] really sort of ludicrous in my mind," Hanson said. "We can't afford to build with that as our criteria, and neither can these guys."

Council member Tony Pippel agreed. Pippel and Hanson pointed to the Palmer ice arena, which recently accommodated 292 cars for a regional hockey tournament.

Two people spent three hours directing traffic, much of it to the next-door Palmer Junior Middle School parking lot.

Since the ice arena and the middle school are busy at different times, that's a reasonable solution for occasional overflows, Pippel said.

The church, he suggested, might make a similar deal with the next-door Mat-Su Borough administration building, open only during business hours.

But Pippel said that in a small town, there are times that people just are going to have to park far and walk far.

"That's just part of what you do when you have a church. Every now and then you're going to have an overflow crowd."

The council set the Planning and Zoning Commission on a code cleanup. Mayor John Combs asked for recommendations from city administration.

"I think we can do a better job of this," Combs said.

Council members acknowledged that they'd eventually have to tackle the issue of whether to require offstreet parking downtown.

"You're either going to go with it, require it in the downtown core area, or you're not," Hanson said.

Contact Kate Golden at 352-2284 or kate.golden@frontiersman.com.