A version of permit parking may be coming to a five-block area in the Huntington Palisades, closest to the recreation center. On January 24, the Pacific Palisades Community Council passed a resolution supporting preferential permit parking on Alma Real Drive from Carey to Frontera; on Ocampo from Alma Real to Drummond and on Toyopa from Carey to Drummond. These streets currently have two-hour limited parking, but permits would allow residents to be exempt from this restriction. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation, having completed a study, asked for Community Council approval in order to implement a preferential parking district. The application now goes to DOT for approval and from there to the City Council. After that, supporters would have to gain backing from 67 percent of the residents on a block, with at least 50 percent of those people buying a permit. Once that is done, permit-parking signs will be installed. Annual permits cost $22.50 and a household would be allowed a maximum of three per year. A resident could also purchase two visitor permits, which cost $15 and are good for four months. The third option would be a one-day guest pass for $1.50. ‘The entire process will take about a month,’ Councilman Bill Rosendahl’s new Field Deputy Jennifer Rivera told the Palisadian-Post on Monday. People using the recreation center would still be able to park for at least two hours on the affected streets. At the Community Council’s January 24 meeting, several people spoke in favor of preferential parking. ‘We in no way want to exclude park visitors from parking on the street,’ Huntington resident Kathleen Boltiansky said. ‘We want the right for residents and [their] guests to park on the street for just like the rest of the residents in the Palisades do.’ She explained that when her parents visit, they either have to park several blocks away or move their car every two hours. Karyn Weber, who lives on Alma Real near the park, said that she has childcare and didn’t want her nanny to leave her children alone every two hours in order to move a car. According to DOT’s Senior Transportation Engineer Brian Gallagher, parking exemptions for this area, called preferential parking district number 50, would be temporary and would have to be renewed annually. Rosendahl’s departing Field Deputy Andrea Epstein told the council that a similar temporary preferential parking district was created around the Brentwood Country Mart and has been successful. ‘It would be a great experiment,’ said Stuart Muller, the council’s Area 6 representative, whose district includes streets east of Temescal Canyon, where his constituents have complained about the lack of residential parking. Three years ago, residents from Alma Real, Carthage Street, Radcliffe Avenue and Monument Street petitioned for a preferential parking district. A traffic study by LADOT showed that in those areas the available parking spaced occupied by nonresidents ‘averaged 50 percent and on some streets 100 percent.’ At a later hearing, Palisadians were split about whether they wanted preferential parking. One concern was about the ‘spillover’ effect onto streets that did not have parking. At that time Pacific Palisades Community Council did not adopt a position. The move towards permit parking in Pacific Palisades hit a standstill. In a July 2005 Palisadian-Post article ‘Preferential Parking District Stalled,’ Alan Willis, the principal transportation engineer with DOT, admitted that Preferential Parking District 50, the original effort to establish preferential parking on streets neighboring the business district, had stalled. In December of the same year, Willis told the Post, ‘We had an assignment to completely rewrite the City Council rules on preferential parking.’ The issue has remained dormant until this past Community Council meeting.
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