Warsaw City Council will review a proposal for downtown parking that received a favorable recommendation from the Traffic Safety Commission Wednesday. Warsaw City Council will hold a public hearing at its July 1 meeting to accept comments on the traffic proposal. An ordinance will be drafted for each parking spot, changing the timeframes for parking, and must be approved by the city council. Warsaw Mayor Joe Thallemer presented the proposal during Wednesday’s traffic meeting for downtown parking that was organized by the on-street and off-street committees with input from downtown business owners. “The original concern was to try to make downtown businesses more accessible and at the same time create parking for downtown employees and to create downtown residential parking spots,” Thallemer said. The proposal establishes fewer two-hour parking spaces but does establish designated parking spaces for downtown residents. Currently most of the downtown area is all two-hour limited parking spaces, accounting for 439 spaces. The proposal calls for the number of two-hour spaces to be reduced to 337, and an additional 184 spaces would be opened up for unlimited parking during the day. Thallemer presented a spread sheet of the parking changes proposal for on-street and off-street parking. The unlimited parking is for daytime hours only. Among the 439 two-hour downtown parking spaces that would be reduced to 337, 307 of them would be on-street spaces and 30 spots off-street. Unlimited spaces would be increased from 46 to 184, with 89 on-street and 95 off-street. The current 169 reserved parking spaces would be reduced to 153 off-street spaces. In addition, 16 designated residential off-street spaces will be created. “Our intention is to provide one parking space per downtown resident to encourage residential development,” Thallemer said. He said the proposal is for those residents to not be required to pay for the residential parking spots. “The big advantage is we have increased the number of unlimited parking spaces away from the center of the city to try to encourage downtown merchants and workers to park away from the central business area and kept our reserved spaces about the same and added residential spaces,” Thallemer said. Thallemer said the parking recommendations came from on-street and off-street parking committees as well as downtown business owners. The parking proposal map will be posted at city hall. In other business, the commission approved Warsaw Police Department Lt. Kip Shuter and City Planner Jeremy Skinner working on lane markings for the Winona Avenue railroad crossing. The commission approved drafting an ordinance recommended by Shuter to be reviewed by Warsaw City Council for no on-street parking anywhere on the city’s truck route for safety purposes. “When heavy trucks passed cars on Hepler Drive they were crossing left of center because they are making the wide curve and they have to make two turns there, and when you have a 53-foot semi do that they are crossing in the opposite lane to do that,” Shuter said.
