Parking Perplexes City Council on Miller Ave. Overhaul

For nearly an hour of the Mill Valley City Council's meeting Monday night, it seemed like 2007 all over again.

Four years ago, the current council halted the ongoing effort to overhaul Miller Avenue, choosing to bifurcate the process and set aside land use issues like housing and zoning that were miring it in controversy.

The move injected momentum into the plans to revamp one of Mill Valley’s two main arteries under the Miller Avenue Streetscape Plan, focusing on the elements of the street itself – travel lanes, bike lanes, landscaping and sidewalks, among others. The council in July.

But the council had one more design issue to tackle Monday - the “Main Street” section of Miller Ave. between Willow Street and Reed Street/Valley Circle. The council struggled to find a consensus over how to proceed, primarily because of an issue that has long plagued the debate over Miller: parking.

All five councilmembers backed a proposal for a tweaked version of the “Main Street” section, which includes the long-debated curve on outbound Miller at . The curve, and the right near a curve in the street, has been a lightning rod for controversy.

The proposal moved the curve away from downtown, and 27 parking spaces would be lost from that area of Miller.

Despite unanimous support for the overall “Main Street” design, that loss was too much for Mayor Ken Wachtel and Councilmember Shawn Marshall, who voted against it because they wanted the city’s consultants to find room for more parking before they would support it.

The city’s consultants on the project, Nelson/Nygaard and Wallace Roberts & Todd in San Francisco, determined that the longstanding parking issues were a matter of management, not a shortage of parking spaces.

“There is plenty of parking out there,” said Jim Stickley of WRT. “The problem is the management of those parking spaces on the street itsely.”

Better management of the parking could include things like time restrictions to force street spaces to turn over more frequently, as the lion’s share of the spaces on Miller are unregulated.

The hybrid plan had the support of most of the attendees Monday night, particularly because of the wider sidewalks and promenade character that seeks to create a second downtown along “Main Street” the stretch of Miller.

“If you do the job right it’s going to be a great street,” local resident Kalvin Platt said. “This hybrid plan does produce something that is unique and fits Mill Valley.”

Former Mill Valley Mayor Bob Burton said parking, or the loss of it, simply couldn’t be the driving force of the council’s decision.

“For the first time Main Street has a discernible character distinct from the Parkway and Gateway sections,” he said. “Parking is important to commerce and merchants but it’s not the only thing that’s important. It is more important commercially to establish a destination and the identity of a place, giving people a reason to stop and a place to congregate. That’s what this does.”

“That identity is worth a whole lot more than a few extra cars,” he added.

Councilman Garry Lion said he was disappointed that no Miller Ave. merchants attended the meeting to address the parking issue. West Blithedale Ave resident Leslie Reiber spoke up in favor of parking, saying the council needed to consider the town’s aging population.

“We’re all getting really old in this town rapidly and we don’t have public transportation – people need to be able to park,” she said. “If there is one more beautiful place that I can’t park, that’s one more place I can’t go.”

Marshall said she liked the hybrid plan, but remained concerned about the loss of parking.

“The loss of the volume of parking we’re talking about does have unintended consequences in limiting the ability to make Miller a multi-use street and not just multi-modal street,” she said.

Wachtel said the plan didn’t address the longstanding friction between commuters and shoppers for parking along Miller.

“There is no place top push the parking on Miller,” he said. “What we’re trading is 15 percent of the parking in the area for sidewalks that are anywhere from five to seven feet wide.”

“I think we’re sending too much time letting parking be the driver,” Councilman Andy Berman said. “I’m hearing from the professionals that it’s not a supply issue, so I’m just not worried about 25 or 27 or 30 parking spots.”

Planning Director Mike Moore said the issue came down to tradeoffs. 

“Is parking more important than having additional sidewalk width to create more of a destination atmosphere in the Main Street area?” he asked.

Marshall asked Stickley if it was feasible to find 10 spaces in the revised plan, and he said it was possible.

“Why are we second guessing so much here and micromanaging a process?” Berman asked. “We weren’t supposed to get but here we’re bottlenecking the issue."

Councilmember Stephanie Moulton-Peters, a Transportation Authority of Marin (TAM) board member, said parking management strategies are nothing new in California and can be an effective tool in managing limited parking availability.

“Marin County is behind the curve on this,” she said. “We live in a lovely rural place but this is something that works. It’s about rationalizing the spaces that we have.”

Moulton-Peters called for a vote on the hybrid plan, but Wachtel and Marshall balked without the inclusion of further study to identify 10 spaces.

Despite its recent progress, the Miller Ave. overhaul won’t start anytime soon. City Hall and the council must outline an implementation plan, a complicated process that involves building the street in phases to allow the city to both find more money to pay for it – the city has about $9 million of the estimated $18 million project cost – as well as its impact on the roadway itself. The council is set to meet on that topic in the coming weeks, with a date not yet set.