Parking changes
Last fall, responding to complaints about people parking in front yards around UMD and the College of St. Scholastica, the city targeted those neighborhoods for enforcement. Officials mailed out notices to residents advising them that every car parked in a front yard would receive a $24 fine and the owner of the property would receive a $200 administrative citation. Alarmed by the short notice and objecting to what they called selective enforcement of a citywide rule, the Duluth Landlords Association (DLA) lobbied the city to delay enforcement to give landlords a chance to react. The city agreed to delay enforcement until June 1, 2017, by which time most of the current year’s college student leases would have expired.
Since then, the relationship between the DLA and the city has been cordial. Barbara Montee, president of the DLA, told me that city staff met with the DLA on two occasions to provide information and solicit input. She described the meetings as productive, saying that she found city staff responsive to the DLA’s concerns.
At the Duluth Planning Commission meeting on April 25, 2017, city planners unveiled a proposed overhaul of city parking regulations. The changes had three main components.
1) Allow tandem parking spaces to count toward rental requirement.
Rental units in the city are required to provide a certain number of off-street parking spaces to tenants based on the number of bedrooms in the unit. Currently, tandem parking—the parking of two or more cars in a row, which blocks in everyone but the car closest to the road—is only allowed to be counted as a single space with regard to the rental requirement. This change would allow landlords to count as many spaces as there are tandem-parked cars toward the requirement.
2) Permit front yard parking at units that meet certain conditions.
Front yard parking is currently illegal. Under the proposed change, front yard parking will be allowed if a household has no other options and a variance is secured. Specifically, the proposal states: “For properties where parking cannot be accommodated on site in the rear yard, side yard [or] that part of the front yard that is to one side of the house, and where there is no way to access the rear yard and where there is no parking on any street within 150’ of the property, the landowner can apply for a variance to allow parking in the front yard for up to 55% of the lot width.” With so many conditions, it seems unlikely that this situation would apply to more than a handful of houses in the city.
3) Require backyard parking spots to be paved.
Currently, backyard parking spaces must be constructed of gravel. Under the proposed change, they would have to be paved. As the city has hundreds, if not thousands, of gravel backyard parking spots, this change could have a huge impact citywide if uniformly enforced. This is by far the biggest change to the city’s parking requirements, yet it appears to have only been added at the last minute. At the Planning Commission’s April 11 meeting, paved backyard parking was not a part of the proposed changes. Two weeks later, on April 25, it was.
Moreover, the city did not inform the DLA of the change. “How did paving get stuck in there?” Barbara Montee asked city planner Kyle Deming during public comments.
“It was included as a discussion item,” Deming replied.
“Okay,” said Montee skeptically. “It wasn’t discussed when the landlords met with you, and we’re a really wise group of people.”
Several neighbors were on hand to support the new regulations. All of them cited aesthetics as a big concern. “When you have those cars parked in the dirt, it really is urban blight,” said Al Makinen of Mississippi Avenue. Other speakers supported paved backyard parking to reduce gravel eroding onto adjacent properties and into storm drains.
One big concern of the landlords was that the rule would be selectively enforced. “My duplex is the only rental on [my] block, and...there’s ten gravel parking spots [at single-family homes on the rest of the] block,” testified Denette Lynch, a West Duluth landlord. “It’s going to affect people citywide, but unfortunately the only people that are going be cited are rentals, because they’re going to get tagged for it when they go through Life Safety and their inspection. So that means...I have to go through the expense of paving it, and I don’t really know why, because none of my other neighbors are going to have to pave theirs.” (In a follow-up email a few days later, Lynch informed the city that she had called some contractors and discovered that the cost to blacktop one parking space could range “from $1,650 to $2,500 per spot.”)
Although most of the planning commissioners seemed comfortable with most of the suggested changes, the issue of paved backyard parking divided them. “It seems like that would be a major burden on a lot of property owners,” commented Commissioner Margie Nelson. Other commissioners appeared comfortable with it. In the end, they voted 4-3 to approve the changes. The proposal now goes to the city council, which can approve it, approve it with modifications, or deny it.
I was curious about the surprise last-minute appearance of paved backyard parking. When I called city planner Keith Hamre, he told me that the issue had come up when a concerned citizen in Woodland complained to the city council about a muddy backyard parking area at a nearby rental property. Three city councilors asked the planning department to look at the issue and come up with some way of addressing it. Paved backyard parking was the planning department’s solution.
If nothing else, this shows the power of contacting your representatives. Based on one person who had an issue with one property, the planning department came up with a rule that could affect thousands of people and cost millions of dollars. We shall see how the city council handles it; landlords have already begun contacting them with their objections. As ordinances require two readings plus thirty days before they become law, the soonest the proposed changes could take effect would be June 21. They will not affect the issue of front yard parking, which will still remain illegal in most cases. Hamre said the city remains committed to beginning enforcement of that rule on June 1.
