By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
Representatives of downtown businesses, as well as concerned citizens and business supporters, turned out Sept. 8 for an informational and question-and-answer session on downtown paid parking, hosted by the city of Sandpoint at Marigold Bistro in the Sandpoint Center.
Planning and Community Development Director Jason Welker offered a presentation on the current state of parking, showing that more than 90% of street parking along First Avenue between Pine and Cedar streets is occupied during the peak hours in the mid-summer season — the same for side streets between First and Second avenues — with between 40% and 51% of those vehicles filling the two-hour stalls for five or more hours.
Meanwhile, no more than 50% of the street parking spaces two blocks from First Avenue are occupied during mid-summer peak hours.
Welker told the Reader in an interview after the Sept. 8 meeting that there’s a common belief in Sandpoint that the city’s supply of parking spaces is constrained, but that’s not the case. Rather, it’s the downtown core on First and Second avenues that has the scarcity of open stalls.
“A lot of people think, ‘I can’t find a parking spot 50 feet from where I’m going, so we have a parking problem,’” he said.
As they’ve worked to craft a downtown parking management plan, city officials have argued that rather than a supply problem, Sandpoint’s parking issues have more to do with turnover on core streets, where one proposal has been to install metered parking to keep vehicles circulating in and out of spaces. That element, in particular, riled business owners who feared meters would deter shoppers from coming downtown.
“It was not just the Shopping District — from Arlo’s on Second all the way to Grace and Joy to Connie’s on the very end and Vyve, Tomlinson’s — and they were like, ‘No we don’t like this,’” said Leilani Williams, who represents 40 merchants as the executive director of the Downtown Sandpoint Business Association.
She said between 60 and 75 people attended the Sept. 8 meeting, with a common sentiment: “Don’t shove this down our throat.”
Welker said the idea of “modest seasonal paid parking and dynamic parking in those [downtown] zones … was not received well, you could say.”
Referencing a Sept. 9 article in the Bonner County Daily Bee with the headline “City nixes paid on-street parking plan,” Sandpoint Mayor Jeremy Grimm told the Reader that, “No decisions have been made, and that was the frustrating thing for me both in the Bee article and the sentiment in the meeting, where folks seemed to feel that we were shoving it down their throats and this was a done deal. …
“Folks really felt like, and took the angle of, ‘Why are you doing this to us, why is this happening to us?’” he said, adding that the purpose of the meeting was to gather feedback on proposals.
“This is a dialogue on, ‘Is there a better way to allocate a scarce resource for the betterment of the business district?’” he said.
As for “nixing” the metered parking idea downtown, Grimm added, “How can something be nixed that hasn’t been implemented? … There was nothing to be nixed.”
Williams told the Reader after the meeting that, “They were saying to us, ‘We’re just presenting it, we’re not doing it,’ but that’s not how it works — if we don’t fight it, they’ll do it.”
Williams also doubted the occupancy numbers cited in the city’s presentation, saying they were drawn from 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when visitors from surrounding states rushed to Sandpoint to avoid lockdowns and other public health restrictions. Today, she said, sales are back to pre-COVID levels though down 30% from 2022, and parking isn’t nearly as hard to find as it was then.
“I’m downtown at least every other day, and I can find a spot on First and Second every time — I might have to go around the block, but I can always find one,” she said.
After listening to the feedback on Sept. 8, both Grimm and Welker said that City Hall understood that downtown merchants would rather see more enforcement of the current parking rules, and expressed general approval for paid parking at city-owned properties like the parking lot between Oak and Church streets.
“I think the fact that 50% of the spaces [in the core] are occupied for more than five hours made people say, ‘Well, we need to give more tickets out,’” Grimm said.
Williams agreed.
“It’s gotten a lot better where the employees will park in those four-hour spaces because their shift is four or five hours … and if they’re in those [two-hour] spots for five hours, they need to get a ticket,” she said.
“I personally would rather see more enforcement and give people an opportunity to know where to buy passes so they know where to park if they’re employees downtown, and maybe not make it $40 a month but $40 a quarter,” Williams added.
According to Welker, the city handed out $90,000 in parking tickets in 2024 and $40,000 so far this year — a lower number, in part, because of lack of parking enforcement staff.
Following that, he added that city staff will be recommending to the City Council at its Wednesday, Sept. 17 that the parking management effort look for more efficient ways to implement the paid parking plan it already has with better enforcement of hourly limits and concentrate on identifying the technology needed for off-street paid parking.
“Narrowing our focus to paid parking on a handful of lots might allow a quicker rollout,” Welker said. However, according to Grimm, “It would be miraculous if by next summer we had paid parking at the downtown lot.”
Williams said the downtown business community is activated after the Sept. 8 meeting, and intends to be more vocal about how it feels the parking plan should evolve — which it will continue to do over the next year.
“They see it now. I feel like they’re going to be really more cohesive and stepping up quicker and with more knowledge than just me doing it,” she said, later adding, “For me, I have hope that these guys listened and they will put a kibosh on this, but I also know that when someone says, ‘We’ve done these reports,’ they’re already invested.”
That’s not the case, according to Grimm, who said, “This is going to be a thoughtful, slow process that’s going to be very open to feedback and comments and collaboration.”
