City reviews parking in thriving downtown

"But it is a great problem to have because the alternative is that parking spaces are empty, and we aren't doing any business," he said.

Downtown parking came up a few months ago, when the City Council rejected a request to open a new pizza restaurant on Main Street. The request was denied because the restaurant could have exacerbated the parking situation.

At a June work session, council members agreed that parking, particularly with new restaurants coming in, is a situation that warrants attention.

"We have a parking deficiency in the evening with the restaurants and when there is a performance at the Palace [Theatre] that brings traffic downtown," Mayor William D. Tate said.

"We need to determine what our needs are."

Neither city leaders nor business owners said the situation

is dire.

"The problem is mostly during the evenings and weekends," said Debi Meek, owner of Bermuda Gold and Silver and president of the Historic Downtown Grapevine Association. "Even then, there is parking, but you may have to walk a ways to get where you are going."

Meek and other business owners praised city officials for monitoring the parking situation and continuing to look for ways to add more spaces by creating new city lots and through joint-use agreements with the downtown churches.

The city most recently made an arrangement with First Baptist Church east of Main Street to use 77 spaces in exchange for repairs and maintenance of its lot.

Grapevine also has an agreement with First United Methodist Church, west of Main Street, to use spaces during off times for church activities.

City Manager Bruno Rumbelow said the city has added several hundred new spaces in the past few years, bringing the total spaces in public lots to 852. That is in addition to about 120 public parallel parking spaces along Main Street.

"The council has asked us to continually monitor the parking situation, and we are continuing to do so," Rumbelow said.

Among the additions was a lot at the corner of East Worth and Jenkins streets, where parking around Esparza's Restaurante Mexicano was encroaching on the historic neighborhood east of Main Street, Tate said.

Parking garages

City officials said there are long-term plans to build at least two, and possibly three, parking garages downtown.

One of the garages will accommodate traffic at the TEX Rail station planned at the southern end of downtown. The Fort Worth Transportation Authority commuter rail line will link Fort Worth to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and connect there with Dallas Area Rapid Transit.

Another parking lot is planned at the north end of downtown near Northwest Highway and a third could be somewhere in between, Tate said.

While parking garages are an obvious fix, city officials said the multimillion-

dollar projects are not ideal solutions. The two identified spots are at the edge of downtown and at least a two-block walk to the main shopping and dining area.

The City Council is considering a comprehensive parking study that would identify usage in the public lots at various periods during weekdays and weekends and estimate how long vehicles stay.

Council member Darlene Freed said she is in favor of doing the research.

"I think we need to do the homework to see if we have a parking problem and how extensive it is," she said. "That will give us the information to decide what to do

about it."

Restaurants

Stores and restaurants outside downtown are required to provide parking spaces based on a formula that involves the square footage of each building.

Downtown, the lots are shared because of a shortage of space, city officials said.

Restaurants are the heaviest users of downtown parking spaces because they have more patrons and employees in their buildings at the same time than do clothing boutiques or gift shops.

"Restaurants use a lot of parking," Tate said. "The restaurants that are already there are grandfathered in so our only option is to look at whether we should allow new restaurants.

"We are looking at this on a case-by-case basis to see how each new restaurant impacts parking," Tate said. "We have a responsibility to do this so that the public and the businesses know what to expect."