(Image Credit: Mel Rothenburger)

By Mel Rothenburger

ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: A city’s history of failure in dealing with its parking problem

Nov 16, 2019 | 6:50 AM

FOR A CITY SO CODEPENDENT on automobiles, Kamloops has a strange aversion to figuring out where to park them.

When my grandfather bought one of Kamloops’ first motorized vehicles (it was a Chevrolet Baby Grand) and test drove it around the McArthur Park race track more than a hundred years ago, parking wasn’t a problem.

Since then, though, it’s been all downhill.

Talk all you want about how people are too spoiled and should learn the benefits of walking a block, but there’s never been a time when downtown Kamloops didn’t need more parking. A new parkade hasn’t been built in close to 50 years.

Instead, the City focuses on on-street parking, replacing the old meters with those infernal kiosks and jacking up fees every once in awhile. (A new increase is scheduled for January, a sort of New Year’s present for shoppers. There will, naturally, be motions by councillors to postpone it.)

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It’s a little like charging passengers to sit in the deck chairs on the Titanic — downtown merchants struggle to convince people to shop downtown and the City deters them with rising rates.

The most famous example of myopic thinking when it comes to parking is the hockey rink. When Riverside Park (now Sandman Centre) was being contemplated in the late 1980s, the need for parking was acknowledged.

But providing parking would have significantly increased the cost from the $23 million needed for the rink alone. So, proponents took out a map of the downtown core and counted up 800 parking spots within “reasonable” walking distance.

Bingo, parking issue solved. Add a few surface spots around the arena and we’re good to go. So when it opened in 1992 with 5,500 seats, there was negligible dedicated parking, and hockey fans discovered the joys of parking 10 blocks away from the venue.

Game nights are quite an experience in downtown Kamloops as fans hike across Victoria Street from wherever they found a parking spot, and then jostle over the Third Street Narrows pedestrian bridge. (Which, by the way, was originally supposed to span Lorne Street and land in the arena plaza, but was cut off on the south side of the street to, again, save money.)

A dozen years later, there was an opportunity to rectify the problem.

In 2004, in anticipation of a waterfront hotel just behind the arena, the City paid $2 million for what was known as the Levesque property kitty corner from the rink. The sole reason for buying the land was to provide parking.

When the waterfront hotel fizzled due to issues with pilings in the beachfront sand, the City still had that Levesque property, which would have solved all the arena’s parking problems, plus served as daytime spillover from Victoria Street.

Keep in mind, a third downtown parkade had been recommended at least since 2000.

So what did the City do? In 2008 it sold the property to developer Tom Gaglardi for the Sandman Centre, giving up any possibility of its use for resolving the parking problem.

But that’s not all. In 2010, it turned around and proposed an $8-million parkade —expandable to three levels — in the Heritage House parking lot across Lorne Street from the property it had

sold only two years before. That plan was deservedly defeated when a counter-petition easily obtained the required signatures, but not before the City spent $280,000 studying it.

Then came the purchase and demolition of the Kamloops Daily News building and creation of 190 parking spots, the vast majority of which have gone to downtown employees, not the public.

And, of course, a 355-stall underground parkade on that same property was defeated along with a performing arts centre in 2015.

Currently we have the prospect of a new iteration of the performing arts centre (a much-needed facility, by the way) being built with no provision for public parking. The 70 spots in the plan will take care of staff and a few others but won’t make a dent in what’s needed during performances in the two theatres and black box within the centre.

When City councillors so enthusiastically agreed to take the PAC plan to referendum, the word parking did not escape their lips. If the new PAC is approved, several hundred more cars will be looking for places to park downtown during performances, in addition to the several hundred already fighting for space on hockey nights.

And, of course, the 190 stalls on that property will disappear.

Regardless of the fate of the PAC, the downtown core will become increasingly congested with automobiles as densification takes place.

There are some who say fewer cars are the answer. There are those who think there should be fewer, not more, parking spaces downtown.

Those ideas are wishful thinking. The need for more downtown parking has been studied for decades. There’s a new study going on that’s going to be released soon.

If the answer to the parking shortage — and how to accommodate PAC patrons — is anything short of a new parkade, it will be in keeping with the city’s long history of avoiding the problem in hopes it will go away.

Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops and newspaper editor. He writes five commentaries a week for CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or the Jim Pattison Broadcast Group.