Quick Take
Santa Cruz just bulldozed its de facto town square — Parking Lot 4 and its beloved magnolias — to make way for a parking garage, affordable housing and a new library, writes activist Rick Longinotti. He argues that the city not only erased a cherished gathering space but also bent fiscal rules, risking public trust by putting taxpayers on the hook for parking debt. The move, he warns, trades a potential civic plaza for short-term convenience and long-term financial uncertainty.
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The Santa Cruz city parking Lot 4 used to serve as a de facto public plaza hosting the downtown farmers market under the grand magnolia trees. The city demolished the trees on Aug. 14 to make way for a parking garage with affordable housing above and a new library. The demolition also included the trees next to the sidewalk that could have been incorporated into the design.
In addition to the trees and the gathering space is another potential loss: the public trust that our dollars will not be used to subsidize parking.
Up until now, expenses for parking construction and maintenance have been paid for by parking revenues. On April 22, the city council departed from that practice (Item 19). Until the parking enterprise fund becomes solvent, the general fund will pay for any expenses not met by parking revenue.
DOWNTOWN LIBRARY/AFFORDABLE HOUSING PROJECT: Read Lookout’s previous coverage here
California law requires voter approval for general obligation bonds (bonds that are secured by general funds). But, to avoid that, city staff found an end-run around that requirement, and the city council went along with it.
The great towns of the world have gathering spaces at their center. The public squares in Monterey and Watsonville were inspired by the plazas of Spain. Alas, Santa Cruz lacks this public amenity, although some argue the popular Abbott Square is a close approximation.
In a 2018 Santa Cruz Sentinel article, Wallace Baine described how Chuck Abbott’s advocacy for a “downtown oasis” resulted in the Pacific Garden Mall, which turned Pacific Avenue into a meandering one-way street amid shade trees and brick planter boxes that provided plenty of seating. The mall ended with the 1989 earthquake.
The demise of the Lot 4 public space traces back to December 2016, when city staff proposed a five-story, 640-space parking garage with a new library as a ground-floor tenant. (Advocacy has resulted in reduced parking and the addition of 124 units of affordable housing.)
The five-story garage was an about-face from the direction the city was headed just six months earlier, when the city contracted Nelson\Nygaard to consult on parking downtown. The consultant practiced the parking management principles pioneered by Donald Shoup, author of “The High Cost of Free Parking.” The idea is simple: manage parking through pricing rather than build parking structures that will not pay for themselves.
Why the reversal? In June 2016, voters passed a tax for the regional libraries. The city manager at the time wanted to build a new library rather than renovate the existing library. The tax revenue was insufficient to build a new library. But sharing construction costs with a parking garage made the project seem feasible.
The contract with Nelson\Nygaard called for the consultant to present its findings to the city council. That presentation never happened, likely because the report did not recommend a new garage. Instead, the report recommended parking management strategies to make better use of existing parking.
In 2019, the city council voted 4-3 (over staff opposition) to implement one of those strategies: bus passes for all workers downtown. Also against staff opposition, the council invited Patrick Siegman, formerly of Nelson\Nygaard, to speak to the council on his study of parking in the downtown. Siegman told the council that the annual parking census showed a steady decline in parking downtown, in line with the experience of cities nationwide, due to telecommuting, Uber/Lyft and online retail.
“Santa Cruz has a parking management problem, not a parking supply problem,” Siegman said. At the same study session, UC Santa Cruz professor and parking researcher Adam Millard-Ball told the council, “It’s cheaper to pay commuters not to drive than to build more parking.”
In 2018, consultant Economic & Planning Systems analyzed city staff projections for paying debt on the garage and reported that the staff model “does not evaluate a worst-case scenario (for parking revenues) where a major recession occurs or a technological change (and pricing) substantially reduces parking demand.”
The consultant’s warning didn’t take long to prove accurate.
In 2020, the pandemic hit. Parking revenues plummeted. Recovery has been slow. City budgets available online demonstrate that the parking district has run a deficit every year since the pandemic. For the fiscal year ending in June, parking revenues were $2.5 million short of meeting expenditures. The insufficient revenue would normally make it impossible for the city to borrow funds for a garage to be paid for by future parking revenues.
Nevertheless, in April the city council approved 30-year bond debt to build the garage. The only way to be able to sell bonds was to put the city’s general fund on the hook for bond payments.
If voters discover years from now that their taxes are still paying for parking, will they vote to tax themselves to support city tax measures?
The lost opportunity for a town square under the magnolias might not be the only casualty of the parking garage.
Rick Longinotti helped write Measure O, which would have dedicated Santa Cruz Lot 4 as space for the downtown farmers market, along with allowing affordable housing on the lot and mandating affordable housing on other city parking lots. The campaign against Measure O, led by developer money, portrayed the measure as “anti-affordable housing.” For the backstory on Nelson\Nygaard’s conflict with the city, see “An Honest Consultant.”