Last September 27, Los Angeles Department of Transportation engineer Emilie Baradi met with concerned Pacific Palisades residents about the proposed preferential parking district. Seeking feedback from the community, Baradi told the 100-plus residents who attended the public hearing, ‘In the next 30 days we will still be waiting to hear from you.’ Now, it’s been more than six months since that meeting, and Palisades residents are still waiting to hear whether LADOT has recommended the controversial proposal to implement preferential parking district 50. Many of these residents had applied for preferential parking because their on-street parking had diminished as a result of spillover from the Palisades business district. Others worried about the spillover effect of the proposed six-block district onto their own streets. PPD 50 is ‘stalled in our backlog right now,’ Alan Willis, principal transportation engineer with LADOT, told the Palisadian-Post Monday. ‘My total staff consists of one person [and] this committee has been totally decimated.’ He explained that one employee resigned, another is on maternity leave and yet another has been absent because of longterm illness; in addition, there’s a ‘hiring freeze.’ ‘We’re struggling to try to finish up what projects we had before PPD 50,’ said Willis, who has ‘no idea’ when they will have a recommendation. ‘We’re trying to keep everything moving with what limited resources we have.’ Willis chaired the public hearing last September, during which he presented a brief history of how PPD 50 came about (several local residents petitioned for it), an explanation of current parking restrictions (which are generally limited to two hours) and the results of the traffic survey that was done. At that time, the Post reported that LADOT had technically approved the proposed district (after conducting the parking survey and determining that the district meets the City’s program criteria). However, the department needed feedback from the community before approving the establishment of the district. Since the hearing, Willis’s crew has collected additional data from streets adjacent to those included in the original proposed district as well as from the Palisades Recreation Center. The next step is ‘to summarize that information and the public hearing comments,’ Willis said. ‘We take all of that information and distill it into a recommendation.’ If the LADOT does recommend the district, the proposal will be forwarded to the transportation committee for approval. If the transportation committee approves the proposal, it will then go before the L.A. City Council.
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