Tenants in a planned new affordable housing development project on Deer Street will pay for parking if they have a vehicle.
Under the plan for the affordable apartment housing development to be built by the Town of Banff on Deer Street, if a renter has a vehicle, they pay, and if they don’t own one, they don’t pay.
Officials say there’s no intent to recover the costs of building a parkade, which could be as high as $60,000 per stall to build, as the majority of those costs will be built into rents, but a nominal fee will be charged.
“The intent of user-pay is to help tenants be able to control their costs,” said Alison Gerrits, the Town of Banff’s community services manager at a council meeting on Monday (March 14).
Councillors had mixed feelings on the move, which culminated in a close 4-3 vote in support of implementing a user-pay system.
Concerned that people would simply park their vehicles on the streets rather than pay for parking in the parkade, Councillors Brian Standish, Chip Olver and Ted Christensen wanted parking to be free, at least in the beginning.
Standish said people who are charged for parking at the Birchwoods development end up parking on the street to avoid the cost.
“They charge people to park there, so people are parking on the street because they don’t want to pay for a stall,” he said. “I’m just concerned this might happen here as well if we charge for parking.”
Coun. Chip Olver said she also worries a user-pay parking system will end up spilling vehicles out onto the street.
“There’s nothing that will annoy a neighbourhood more and make people more resistant to us going ahead with other construction … than if we have a negative impact on that neighbourhood,” she said.
“If there’s empty stalls underneath because people don’t want to pay for parking, and it’s spilling out onto the street, I think we’ll have concerned neighbours and I want to be a good neighbour.”
But Mayor Karen Sorensen, Grant Canning, Stavros Karlos and Corrie DiManno wanted a user-pay parking system.
Karlos said he’s not interested in building any more parking in town for free.
He said bylaw services could beef up enforcement if vehicles end up on the street.
“If it’s not user pay, people who don’t have cars in this building are subsidizing the ones who do,” he said.
For this development, the Town plans to make use of a 2014 council policy that allows for a reduction in the number of off-street parking stalls for apartment buildings, based on a number of specific factors like proximity to public transit, car pool sharing programs and unit size.
The policy is based on an emerging trend in Canada and the U.S. that shows apartment housing does not require as much on-site parking as previously believed, because many people living in rental units don’t have vehicles.
Even if the Town is able is able to take advantage of all incentive bonuses to qualify for a parking reduction under the policy, known as C122, the parking won’t fall below 0.6 stalls per dwelling unit.
