With cars spilling out of some Escambia apartment complexes, county looking at parking fixes

In some Escambia County neighborhoods, there are more cars than spaces for them. County leaders are considering some ordinance changes to address that and make it easier for people to park where they live.

Escambia engineers say part of the problem is that new housing developments don’t always include enough room for all the vehicles that usually come with one household, be it a house, townhome or apartment.

That leaves some residents to park on the street or left to navigate heavy traffic getting to and from their house, which can be a problem for neighborhoods on busy roads.

“Many times we see subdivisions come in and then they add another extension to the subdivision and it might even be apartment complexes,” said Escambia County Director of Engineering Joy Blackmon. “You may have 300 apartments tie into that and that means I don't really want people to have to back out into their street at 7:30 in the morning and dodge 300 other residents who are coming out of an apartment.”

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Escambia County Commissioner Steven Barry brought up the parking issue at an agenda review meeting earlier this month, saying he often saw cars lined up along the roads around the University of West Florida, like University Parkway, where many students live in apartments and residential neighborhoods.

“From my point of view, it’s very hard to blame the residents,” said Barry, who represents that district. “If there’s a four-bedroom apartment and there are four young people there that all have vehicles, if I was one of those four young people, I would expect that I could have somewhere I could park without being harassed.”

It's an issue commissioner Robert Bender said he has also seen.

“Especially from the safety aspect of students having to walk to their apartment half a mile away at night because there’s no parking,” Bender said. “You go up and down University Parkway, you have cars that are parked all along the side of the road."

Commissioners Bender and Jeff Bergosh agreed developers need to take into account the need for more parking spaces.

“I think the only thing we can do to encourage it is change the ordinance that changed the requirements for spots per bedroom,” said Barry.

Bender said the county recently formed the Professional Advisory Committee to make such recommendations and update code to reflect parking and other changes.

Blackmon has been taking a closer look at the land development code and design standards manual. In a presentation to the Professional Advisory Committee this week, she said the language about parking is too general, which can limit the county’s ability to address it.

When it comes to residential parking requirements, Blackmon said the county and developers need to consider several issues: if the current number of spaces standards are adequate, if dwelling units are single family or “rent by room,” if there’s enough room to store vehicles on the property, and if sidewalks should be taken into consideration when building.

The county is also looking at residential and commercial interconnectivity to reduce impact to adjacent highways and intersections.

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With these issues in mind, Escambia County is considering requiring two parking spaces for single family homes up to three bedrooms; three spaces for four or five bedroom multi-family homes like townhomes, condos or apartments; two parking spaces for one bedroom units, two and a half spaces for two to three bedroom units and three spaces for four bedroom units.

“If you think about it, especially with apartments, even if it's a one-bedroom apartment, it may be two adults in there, each one with a vehicle,” said Blackmon. “We would love in the long run if everything could be more walkable, bikeable and that sort of thing, but we really just don't have public transportation that allows for a lot of that. This is just to be practical.”

Bergosh added he’d also like to see a thorough review of rules regarding apartment complexes and do a better job of addressing the impact on existing infrastructure as well as notifying the public before a project is built.

Commissioner Lumon May cautioned that parking issues in his district were different than ones in more rural areas and a blanket ordinance on parking and development may not serve the entire county.

Besides parking, commissioners are also looking at ways to ensure home buyers are aware of what is their responsibility in a new development, like a maintaining private road or holding pond, as well as making sure developers are sticking to the building plans that the county approved, so there aren’t any surprises for homeowners, neighbors and the county.

Bender said issues like parking and other complaints have been coming up after a project is built, often from homeowners, and they want to take a more proactive approach in tackling potential problems or mistakes before they happen.

“You think about how much building development is going on versus the issues you hear about, and our goal is to reduce the ones you hear about and that's our role in the process is to try to prevent that from happening,” Bender explained.

The proposed ordinance changes are still in the planning phase and won’t be presented to county commissioners for consideration for at least a couple of months.

“What we're doing is just opening the conversation and letting the development community know that we will be discussing this in detail with all new development to come in,” said Blackmon. “We need to be more innovative.”

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Escambia County development rules may make more room for parking