Planning for stakeholder input on downtown parking management

Chris Heineman, Griff Wigley, and I had a face-to-face meeting last week, January 16.  We have been keeping in touch through Basecamp (web-based project planning service) and decided it was time to have a real meeting.

We chatted briefly about the Northfield News article, How can Northfield better manage existing downtown parking? and decided that I should post my full e-mail to the reporter, Kaitlyn Walsh (@NFNKaitlyn), here on the blog which I did later that day.

We then talked about getting a sense of the 2013 Council’s view of a parking management project in the broader context of other Council priorities.  Until or unless we get new feedback from the Council’s upcoming planning session, we’re going to stick with the concept of project completion (a summary of our findings and some kind of recommendations for the Council) at the end of the first quarter.

Finally, we identified stakeholders groups for face-to-face meetings.  They are, in no particular order:

Building Owners
Bicyclists
Restaurant Owners
Retailers
Pedestrians
Office Users
Residents
City Staff
Visitors
College Students
Public Transportation Users

Our first face-to-face meeting will be with stakeholders who have a significant economic stake in downtown parking management, Building Owners.  Ideally, we’d like to meet with at least one group every week.

In parallel with our face-to-face meetings, we plan to spend time identifying parking management techniques used by other communities.  We don’t want to drive the discussion, for that, we’re looking to the stakeholders.  However, we are interested in the state of the art…or at least “best practices”.  If you’ve heard of anything clever, please let us know.

That’s pretty much what there is to share at this point.  If you have any comments or questions, share them with us by posting them on the project website.  It’s an equal opportunity, but not anonymous, website.