Now that the city of Kirkland is trying to make better use of available parking downtown and giving residents access to the City Hall lot to meet demand, it is looking toward long-term solutions for increasing the supply.

One of the ways it may do this is by opening up Lake Avenue West, one of the few streets in the city to have permit-only parking, to both resident and downtown employees as part of an effort to make more parking availabile for customers. The Kirkland City Council voted at its June 16 meeting to have city staff come back with options for their July 7 meeting to allow such permitting at all times, seven days a week.

Meanwhile, the city is implementing solutions approved by the council in May in an effort to increase use of existing parking stalls in places where drivers either don’t know they exist, such as underground parking, or at the Kirkland Library parking garage by adding signage. They have also signed off on maintenance work inside the library garage.

The city has also opened up the City Hall parking lot during the evenings and weekends and by July 6 will extend the paid parking times at the lot on Lake and Central near Marina Park to between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. Previously, the paid parking time started at 5 p.m.

The Kirkland Alliance of Neighborhoods (KAN) has also established a task force to tackle the issue of parking that spills over into residential neighborhoods. Among the places where the city might add more parking is at one of their properties south of City Hall. According to city of Kirkland Transportation Engineering Manager David Godfrey, if the city were to make it a paved lot rather than just gravel there would be minor differences in what the city would have to do, though city staff have recommended retaining a consultant to study it more thoroughly before taking any action.

The council’s vote on Lake Avenue West came after a presentation by Godfrey that included recommendations made by the Planning Housing and Economic Development Committee to allow permitted parking for downtown employees, albeit with time restrictions in order to minimize the impact on the neighborhood.

Not everyone on the council, however, was supportive of the idea. Councilmember Toby Nixon said that a city-wide policy on permit parking based on specific criteria should be established first, as other neighborhoods will ask the city for permit only parking as more parking is pushed onto their streets.

Councilmember Dave Asher also shared his apprehensions about the proposal, stating that parking is a problem for all neighborhoods in the city.

“This is not a downtown problem, this is a city of Kirkland problem,” he said. “I’m not willing to open up neighborhoods to overflow parking at this time, but we need to do some kind of mitigation and some kind of approaches other than that, and I think we ought to move forward as quickly as we can.”

Councilmember Penny Sweet, who runs the wine business Grape Choice across from the Lake and Central parking along with her husband, State Rep. Larry Springer, said that the parking situation in downtown necessitates opening up Lake Avenue West now.

“There is capacity on Lake Avenue West,” she said. “We are talking about a temporary experiment that, in my mind, will control employee parking and actually work better than opening it up. I think we would end up in a longer term process… but it would give us some immediate relief.”

Sweet also said that this would provide immediate relief for downtown businesses while KAN’s task force looks into possible parking permit policy criteria.

“I do believe that it (KAN’s task force) is going to be somewhat of a lengthy process,” she said. “It’s summer, we don’t have parking downtown and it is worse every single weekend.”

Mayor Amy Walen voiced her support for opening up Lake Avenue West, albeit she also expressed concerns over the impact to the neighborhood.

“Whatever action we take isn’t going to be carved in stone,” she said. “If there are problems we will quickly respond to them.”

She also said that creating downtown employee permit parking would just add more to a system she doesn’t believe should exist.

“But I am going to support this because I feel the time has come and we need to move forward,” she said. “It has been difficult to take a wonderful thing from a neighborhood. If it’s a disaster we will be responsive and take care of it.”

During the public comment section of the June 16 meeting, several residents spoke in opposition to the Lake Avenue West proposal, arguing that it shouldn’t be used as a parking lot for downtown employees.

One woman who spoke cited city policy G-11, which pertains to downtown parking. A section of the policy reads “Parking in the Peripheral Area (boundary) is intended to serve residential demand and uses generating demand from within the zone. It is intended that ‘spillover’ from other parking zones within the CBD (Central Business District) be mitigated.”

She also said that Lake Avenue West has along acted as a woonerf – a walking street – long before Park Lane improvements intended to make the road more pedestrian friendly, and that if the city were to open it up to parking they would have to improve street conditions first.

Another long-term solution considered by the council was studying the feasibility of an underground parking garage beneath Peter Kirk Park and the Lee Johnson Field, though they ultimately rejected the notion. Councilmembers such as Nixon commented that they shouldn’t look at any underground parking garage at Lee Johnson Field until the library parking garage is being fully utilized, while Councilmember Doreen Marchione said they don’t know the ultimate impact of a Parkplace redevelopment on downtown parking. Councilmember Shelly Kloba also agreed, saying that the City Hall parking lot is not being used to full capacity.

Instead, the council expressed interest in studying the possibility of a parking structure on Lake and Central, which Nixon described as a multilevel city-owned parking structure with retail on the first floor and a restaurant rooftop plaza.

“It could be very commercially successful,” he said. “I think that would be a better use of our limited resources right now than digging up the baseball field.”