Recommendation to receive and file the report, “Downtown Long Beach Parking Improvement Update.”  (Districts 1,2)
Thank you. And if we can go back to Mr. Million's item. 25. Okay. We're on page three. Third slide. Today's presentation is based on the memorandum to you on October 2nd, which provided an update to the progress to the many improvements. This memorandum followed a request on August 18 by the City Council to return to October with an update. This presentation follows the first presentation on August 18th. One of the first most urgent steps we took was to assess the security situation and take action. Since August 18, we have increased the security at City Place structures. These structures include Lot A, which is located between fifth and sixth streets by Madina offices, Lot B, which is located between fourth and fifth streets and Lot C located between third and fourth streets, and will be the parking structure for Studio 111. Security now in place is 24 seven, which includes weekends and nights. Previously, security made rounds only during business hours on Monday through Friday. These patrols will also follow the instituted procedures in March, requiring the security guard to use their mobile devices to check into designated areas and provide a report. Additionally, employees of nearby businesses can request a security escort in the late evenings to get to their vehicle. Standard Parking. Plus, the city's contractor, who manages the city place garages, have also hired a customer ambassador. This ambassador adds another set of eyes and ears on the garage and attends to customers throughout the day. The ambassador assists customers with any problems they might encounter with the garage, earning frequent contact with Klotz Security, which patrols the garages . Additionally, the ambassador strategically returns to lot A during key times, including in the middle of the day as American career college students transition from day to evening classes. And at the end of the day. When Molina employees depart from their offices. Standard parking has been fully cooperative in their partnership with the city to address these issues. In addition to increasing security at the garages, standard parking has also increased the cleaning of the garage. Garages will undergo a high pressure power wash treatment on a monthly basis and twice weekly street bangs compared to the previous quarterly washings and once weekly sweeping. This increased cleaning schedule is in line with cleaning practices at the aquarium parking structure also managed by standard parking. Additional maintenance staff have been added in the evening shift to address any issues of maintenance, including graffiti abatement and emptying overfilled trash bins. This is in addition to the morning shift that also empties trash. In addition to the security and maintenance improvements, we have centralized parking information on the city's website. Visitors can go to w w w thought Long Beach dot gov slash parking and find direct links to purchase a monthly parking permit for parking structures and lots managed by standard parking on behalf of the city. Annual beach lock permits and other parking related requests. Easy to locate numbers have been added for convenience. Previously, only the citation office number was included. Here is the front page of the parking services web page. You'll note in the red circle are links related to downtown parking and monthly parking permits, which were added after the August 18 meeting. The critical phone numbers can be found in the blue bar on the right hand side. This is in addition to other parking related items. If you click the monthly parking permit site, you will be directed to an easy to complete enrollment form. Standard parking reports that we receive about 2 to 3 inquiries per week. In addition to streamlining the website, we continue to make progress on the parking mobile application, which will display live data on mobile applications. The parking app will draw on live occupancy data collected by the new sensors. The is in the first to deploy this cutting edge technology of non street embedded sensors. This slide here summarizes the general improvements to the parking structures. We're well on our way to completing this list and taking additional projects. It has been updated since the October 2nd to reflect completions and progress made in addition to security, maintenance and marketing. Standard parking has worked with nearby stores to reconfigure, reconfigure cart corrals, removed damaged cart corrals, and implemented a system that remove carts from nearby stores. The removal of the cards have been completed and the removal of the cart crews have been completed and the cuts will be and removal of the costs will be an ongoing progress. Standard parking monitors, the garage for stray carts. We have received a quote on the fencing off of a certain area in the structure, and we're in the process of moving that forward. Likewise, the elevator window washing has been initiated. Finally, the city added lights to the walkway in Lot A in May of this year. Recently the wall was repainted and the walkways cleaned up to remove stains. We're also adding even more lighting to the walkway. These additional projects are included in this list, which shows the work that public works and standard parking has done and will continue to do so. As mentioned, city staff is adding more lights to the walkway and lot A after adding lights in May to further improve the customer service experience. Standard Parking is looking to relocate to a storefront so that customers can easily meet with standard parking representatives and an easy to find location. The city will remain diligent in evaluating current security operations and maintenance. At this time, I would like to share with you some before and after photos. Standard Parking Plus has undertaken these improvements on city's behalf. Here you can see the old signs are replaced with bright new signs. The new updated ticket dispenser has indications about video recording and is covered with information about where to ask for help. The parking islands have been repainted. Here's another view of the parking islands with the refreshed ticket dispensers. Extended parking also added new landscaping to the front with drought tolerant shrubs. The walkway and Lot A has been considerable attention. Standard parking has painted the wall one solid color as a blank canvas for future mural opportunities. The walkway also have been refreshed and you can see the stairs have been eliminated in the after photo. As I mentioned, corrals have been removed or replaced with new smaller corrals, and standard parking has identified daily collections. If the nearby stores do not take the responsibility to remove carts in a timely manner. Finally, the firehose box mission on August 18 has been repainted and plexiglass replaced. While we made major improvements, Public Works has identified additional opportunities to further enhance the parking experience. These enhancements include interior repair of the structures, which include repairing surface cracks. Additional computer service to support the added security cameras and painting. The estimated cost of these improvements are approximately $430,000 per garage in labor and material costs based on quotes we received. The structures have undergone an energy audit, which the city will have results on this audit at the end of this year. This audit will provide a more firm cost estimate of energy savings, potential rebates and incentives and other financing options for LED conversions. This future improvements also align with the renaissance that City Place will undergo with the addition of Studio 111 as an anchor tenant. I had the pleasure of meeting with Studio 111 recently to discuss their fantastic creative vision for Los C, which is located between third and fourth streets. This speaks to the department's continued belief that community partnership are key to the thriving and successful parking experience. And we invite our partners to work with us to ensure the safety and success of parking in downtown and citywide. The funding for these improvements have and will come from three important sources. Parking garage revenues from city plates will offset the maintenance and security enhancements previously discussed. This $125,000 costs will not have structural budget impacts to the general fund. Downtown parking meters will also support parking improvements in this area, including Cityplace in working with financial management. We estimate approximately $70,000 every two months in net meter access revenue. Finally, any additional funding identified by City Council could also fund these improvements. We've also focused these presentations on the city place garages thus far. I do want to briefly cover the following as these issues were raised at the previous council meeting. Specifically, we have a new city traffic engineer and we will begin the review of parking surrounding the courthouse, focusing on alleviating the parking impacts in the adjacent residential areas. Secondly, staff will reach out to private vendors to encourage them to adopt new technology. While the city has made significant upgrades on city owned parking structures and city lots. Not all of the individual private non city owned structures have taken those steps. Thank you for your time, and I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you, Mr. Malloy and Councilwoman Gonzalez. Yes. Thank you, Ira. Thank you, Ciaran, for the wonderful presentation. I know it has been some time for us to get to this point, but I really do want to give you a lot of gratitude for this presentation and the way it looks and it's organization. I know it's been a lot of us working collaboratively to be able to to bring us to where we're at now. And as everyone knows, downtown parking is a big topic, especially in the first district, just in in the city in general. So I have a few questions, but I again want to just thank you for pointing out all of these important topics for us, because I think it makes. It a lot easier for us as a council office, but also just as a city to be able to point to where our parking is in the downtown. And then also some of our core areas like city place that has often not looked so good. Now it's looking a lot better and we can really point to it and say this is something that is evolving every single day. But it's it's it's getting there and it's looking a lot better. So a few questions I know you had in the report. It mentioned a customer ambassador. And this is this is someone employed with our contractor. Correct. And this is how many hours with this person work? Is it a normal 40 hour workweek or what does that look like? Honorable Gonzales. Yes, this is the ambassador is an employee of essential parking, and they're employed, I think, 9 to 6 Monday through Friday. Perfect. And as far as security practices, I'm glad to see that that was a emphasized. I know we've also talked and I'll just reiterate this as well as reiterate this again, as far as security is to make sure that there's more efficient security practices. And I know you've had discussions with our contractor in terms of, yes, it's great to have security there, but to ensure that they're actually doing their job when they're there, which I know we you know, we've we've addressed. So I just wanted to point that out. Also, with power washing, we've talked in the past about better notification. So how will tenants be notified? I know Molina health care has quite a few employees there. I know there's been issues with notification and power washing. So how will employees how will residents be notified? Great question. I know that we had one instance that there was some confusion with some of the employees coming from one entrance versus the other entrance. That situation has been rectified. Central parking does the notifications. They provide notifications 48 hours before the power washing. It's scheduled already, so all the tenants know which days the power washing is going to occur. And we will also use Twitter and Facebook to inform any constituent that this this is occurring. Okay. Thank you. So there will be a notification there. And then ice. I know we talked about a better parking office situation where it currently stands now. It's it's not very customer friendly. You have to kind of find your way to be able to even pay for monthly parking, which could be a hindrance for a lot of people. So what is the timeline on Central Parking's reorganization of of a better parking? We're working with the with with the property owner. Unfortunately, central parking doesn't have any control where they can go. So it's we're working with the property owner to make sure they can provide a space for central parking to relocate. So that's in progress. And we'll get back to you when that occurs. But it's an effort that we started. We recognized as the location that central parking was given. It's not too obvious. So we want to as as in the report indicates we want to find a storefront that they can relocate to and they'll have direct access to the street. Okay. Great. Um, and one sort of last question is how are we working with our businesses? So I know we have been in contact with Walmart who had in previous days had know sometimes left shopping carts. There's been trash, I mean, around the property. So how are you working with the city place property owners specifically about city place and some of the local areas I'm sorry, the local businesses about the maintenance. We we're having at least that I know of monthly meetings with our business ambassadors I would called central parking's involved my staff is involved we've had a lot of good luck with Walmart. They've been really stepping up to the removal of the carts. They are the ones that removed the broken carts and the corrals. So we basically we're going to enforce what we said we're going to do if if we have a cart that it's not removed within a certain time period, we're going to remove it for them. So that's that's our approach. And fortunately, they're doing a great job at this point. They're at the table discussing with us and we're in continuous communication with them. We have a lot of email discussions with them also, so that's moving forward with the local businesses that are around there. We also have to partner with with Mr. Shoshone to make sure that his clients are also being responsible for some of the stuff that goes on around there. So I have a meeting with Mr. Shoshone to discuss that issues also. Great. Thank you. And and then I will say that our website looks great. I think it's a it's a wonderful evolution from where it was before. It is one stop shop you are able to find. I mean, right there, it quantifies the amount of parking spaces we have, which is 9000. It also states that the lowest monthly rate is $35, which I think is very enticing for some people because I mean, as a council member of the first and just working in the district for six years, people will say there is no parking in downtown. And I keep telling people there is parking in downtown, you just have to pay for it in some cases. And then in other cases it's 2 hours for free. But we didn't in the past have that all in one place for us. For me as a representative to go to a website to pointed out to our residents and our business owners, and now we do. And thankfully and I know it will continue to evolve as we bring more property owners if they are interested, but it will continue to evolve. So I want to thank you for that. Um, I'll, I'll, I'll just ask that we continue looking at different marketing approaches as well. One last thing that I don't think I mentioned before, but um, maybe I mentioned it to Tom is electric car parking. And I believe we have Zipcar locations as well in downtown. I'm not sure if that's the case. Maybe not. Okay. Our saying no, but I know we do have electric plug in locations and so that would be great to advertise some way somehow through signage in the downtown. So what are we doing about that? Um, that's an excellent question. Part of our mobile app, it will have a function in it that shows recharging stations. So we have some, for example, on Broadway parking structure, we have electric, electric charging stations for the public that will show on the on the app. So if you go to I mean, we if Park MI finishes their their app, you will find that information. So it's it's part of that application. And also we can show it on our website if that needed to be. And it's currently available on their website. I also forgot to mention that our biggest partner is the LBA and we're working with them. We have we will have biweekly bi monthly meetings with them to discuss all the issues in downtown. But specifically parking is as part of one of our first initiatives. So I neglected to mention that this is going to occur and we're going to participate with the LBA in future marketing and partner with them in any way possible to enhance the parking experience in downtown. Well, great. Well, thank you. I was actually going to close with that saying that we should make sure that we're meeting more often, my office included. I know I just spoke with Craig not too long ago and Sean and I really want to thank them as well for their efforts in overall in the downtown parking, especially because they've been a large part of this as well. And it just really adds to the vitality of our economic development. We're changing a lot in downtown, I mean, from where it was before to where we are now in downtown, it's it's really it's a it's a big deal. So I just want to close and say thank you again for this. I look forward to the changes and look forward to. Meeting with you on this. So congratulations. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Councilwoman Gonzalez. Councilmember Richardson. Just want to chime in and just say congratulations to both the downtown council members. This is a big win. And when you work so hard and have a moment to be able to celebrate all the work that's been done and come to this point, I think it is important to take this time out. City Council. So again, congratulations. When I visit a different city, I always check to see what apps the city has. I was in Washington, D.C., and I checked out the bike share app and it got navigated me to the right place to check out a bike. And I did my whole tour there. So, I mean, the more we can think about getting online, having an app, figuring out how to tie it into the our bike stations or whatever, I don't remember what our bike infrastructure thing is going to be called. Bike share. That would be cool too. So thanks and congratulations. Thank you. And I wanted to thank Mr. Malloy and as well for your hard work and the staff in putting the presentation together, but really also improving the infrastructure that we have to make parking as not so much as easy as possible, definitely make it as easy as possible, but also the availability as easily known as possible . And I think that when people come into our downtown, if they can just know. With methods outside of just wayfinding signs. It really does liberate folks. And it makes the point clear that there is plenty of parking, as Councilwoman Gonzalez said. But it's just not knowing perhaps where it is or having the clarity as to which are the ones that you pay for and which of the ones you don't. And it's part of a strategy. And the overall strategy is demand management through pricing. And we want to be sure that we strike a balance between what's charged, what's available and where where the parking assets are and where the other businesses are and where people want to go. So thank you. Is there any member of the public that wish to address Council on item 25? Mr. Cogen. Good to see you. You got it. Good evening. I am Francis. Emily Dawson. Harrison and I reside in District one, and I think this is just absolutely awesome, the progress that you've made on this matter regarding the parking and I'm out and about quite a bit and my concern is because I didn't hear anything mentioned, although you may already have covered as there's quite a number of people that are out and about that are disabled. And I want to find out what the availability of the parking is for persons that are disabled. And the other thing, too, of concern is Walmart is going to be adding well, they're in the process of bringing in the grocery store. And I'm told in here we're talking about a city place. And I'm hearing more and more people are all excited about coming down to Walmart. And I don't know if you have the capacity of looking at the potential impact that that may have on the parking in that area, because it might be kind of a little less parking. So I just thought I would come forward on this matter. And also the concern to us when they're the parking some is occupied and the lots are you finding that there's problems where people are parking into areas where people reside because there's such a thing as having preferred parking, you know, in some more suburban type of areas where I students were going and parking in front of houses and the house owners didn't have enough parking for their family and their guests. So and I just to add a whole lot to you, but I just thought I'd share that with you. Thank you, Max. Thank you, Francis. Next speaker. Good evening, Madam Vice Mayor. Members of the City Council. My name is Craig Cogen with the downtown Long Beach Associates. I want to thank counsel more Gonzales for bringing this up almost a year ago. It was November that you brought this up. And certainly there's been May there's been a lot of progress made on this. And certainly there's a lot more work to do. But I'm pleased to hear the progress that has been made to date. And Vice Mayor, you would remember that we've kind of moved this conversation of downtown parking from a lack of inventory ten years ago to now. It's more about the customer experience and it's about marketing the asset that we have. And it's part of the first and last experience that customer may have coming in to our downtown center. And that is to us, it's very, very important. We can't lose sight of really what is attracting these customers, these visitors, what asset we provide them and what experience we give them when they first arrive and when they last leave. And that's really what this is all about. It's no longer inventory. It is about what is experienced on a regular and daily basis. So I'm pleased to hear that the maintenance and security has improved. But those are perceptions. And I think we have to change perception into reality. And I think there is economies of scale of what we could do based on the types of services that are provided on the public realm within the downtown, as well as the private spaces that the city owns relative to parking lots and parking garages and the assets that we're talking about as far as City Place is concerned . And we're very excited about what Mr. Shushan is doing with city plates and what the vendors and the tenants are doing with City of Place. 2 hours free parking in the center of our downtown that at that we have approximately 2500 spaces is an it is an extraordinary asset to our downtown. Not many downtowns will be able to offer to our free parking without validation in the center of our downtown. That one could walk 2 to 3 blocks to get to their destination. And I'd like to elevate the conversation. In a more strategic fashion. If I could recommend to city staff that we look at not only the structures, the maintenance, the security and the marketing of these structures, but also the on on street parking experience. City and DARPA invested almost $2 million this past year for smart meter parking in our downtown. And I think we now need to consolidate this conversation into one strategic plan, one definite idea of how we want to create this experience. So I applaud Councilmember Gonzalez's initiative to bring this to staff's attention. I commend staff for presenting some very positive results. We look forward to working together in the future and creating more positive results. Thank you. Thank you. Councilwoman Gonzales. Yes. Thank you both for the comments. Thank you, Francis. And I will ask because I know it has been brought up before and I failed to mention the disabled parking. I know the opportunities for that. I don't I don't know if we've reviewed that a little bit in length, but to see what the you know, if we're on track with the amount of disabled parking spots we have. But I do know that the access in to City Place is also a little bit difficult, even for someone who does not use a wheelchair. So I would think someone who does use a wheelchair would be even even worse. So if we can look into that as well. But thank you both for your comments. Thank you. And there is no further request to speak. Members, cast your vote. Motion carries. And we have one last hearing before we get to public comment. Hearing item two.