Parking requirements are not what people think in Sandpoint

By Jason Welker
Reader Contributor

There’s a lot of misinformation about what the city “requires” of private developers in Sandpoint with regard to off-street parking. Recent op-eds and posts on social media have claimed that the city is somehow letting the developers of the 56 Bridge Street Hotel at City Beach off the hook by allowing them to provide less than the “code-required” amount of parking spaces. 

To be clear, there is no single “code-required” number of parking spaces for any new development in Sandpoint. In fact, for most of the downtown area, there are no requirements for off-street parking whatsoever. Any new development within the city’s vast “parking exempt zone” is free to provide as much or as little off-street parking as the developer feels is necessary to support their business. 

Jason Welker. File photo.

The developers of 56 Bridge Street, by virtue of owning property immediately outside the parking exempt zone, have three options for determining how much off-street parking they will provide: 1. either calculate the number of spaces using a convenient table in City Code called “minimum and maximum surface parking requirements”; 2. pay a parking in-lieu fee of $10,000 per parking space to reduce the amount of parking determined by the table by up to 50%; or, 3. conduct a site specific demand analysis to determine “the actual demands of the project,” which may then be used by the planning director (that’s me!) to set parking requirements. 

Through options No. 2 and 3, the developer of the City Beach hotel has committed to providing 145 off-street parking spaces, based on the demand study results (prepared by a registered professional traffic engineer licensed in the state of Idaho), who determined that the actual level of parking demand generated by the hotel would be 141 spaces — the required number of parking spaces for the new hotel at City Beach. 

In fact, given this number, the hotel could have then, by right, paid $70,000 in in-lieu fees and reduced their off-street parking to just 71 spaces. Rather than allowing that, the city negotiated an in-lieu payment of $400,000 (which was not a requirement of code), which will go directly into improving the city’s public parking facilities — specifically the resurfacing, landscaping, stormwater treatment and new lighting at City Beach. 

Let me be clear: This is a huge win for the city and the public will directly benefit from this in-lieu payment through an improved and enhanced public facility.

Opponents of the hotel project and the city’s proposed paid parking policy, which was a recommendation of both the 2022 Downtown Parking Study and the city’s Comprehensive Plan as a tool for “applying creative, cost-effective methods to address public parking needs while preserving our traditional urban environment,” want you to believe that backroom deals were made to “reduce parking fees for a developer” while “putting fees on the community.” 

In reality, all developers in Sandpoint are either entirely exempt from having to provide any off-street parking or are invited to do a site-specific parking demand analysis to determine their true level of parking demand. 

Ultimately, Sandpoint’s City Code supports urban development that puts people over cars, and the opportunity for developers to pay in-lieu fees or conduct site-specific studies reflects the city’s commitment to “people-first” urban development that does not require overprovision of vehicle parking, which, over time, would result in an urban landscape dominated by paved parking lots and vertical concrete parking garages. 

Under Sandpoint’s current leadership, the Planning Department is committed to fulfilling the community’s vision of a dense, vibrant, downtown commercial area that puts people over cars, preserves historic buildings, and promotes public gathering spaces while prioritizing open spaces and skylines characterized by historically contextual architecture and views to the surrounding mountains over an environment dominated by asphalt and concrete parking facilities that sit underutilized for 10 months of the year. 

No code must be violated or ethics breached to fulfill this vision, and we look forward to working with property owners who care to promote these values through their work in our lovely city. 

I would encourage anyone with questions or concerns about parking management in City Code or the proposed paid parking policy to contact me directly, and not to believe everything (or perhaps anything) they read online. I will always return your email or phone call if you are interested in talking facts, not railing against a fiction you heard third-hand or from someone with an agenda: [email protected] or 208-255-1738. 

Jason Welker is the Planning and Community Development director for the city of Sandpoint.