Supervisors end Soquel parking program

Public Works Director hints toward sunset of the Live Oak parking program, for good

SOQUEL >> Due to a lack of community support and generation of sufficient revenue, the Soquel Village Parking Program was disbanded in an official Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors resolution this week.

The parking program featured five lots in the Soquel Village, four of which began on the 4500 block of Soquel Drive and one of which was located on West Walnut Street. Two lots were free for the first two hours while the other three were paid parking through stations that accepted cash, coin and card. Parking costs 50 cents an hour.

The officials acted on the request of staff, which recommended that the county stop collecting village parking revenue, eliminate an existing intrafund loan with the dissolution of the program, and in turn, accept a $100,000 loss.

“There will be no financial impact to the general fund, however the resources needed for future maintenance needs have yet to be identified,” wrote Matt Machado, deputy county administrative officer and director of Public Works, in his report in reference to the county’s continued responsibility to keep up the lots.

In the resolution, approved in concept at the board’s previous meeting, supervisors made the findings that because the program is not popular with locals, it does not raise enough funds to cover parking enforcement and maintenance of the lots.

It also found that changes in California law have made the funding of the parking program virtually impossible in this circumstance. As explained by County Resource Planner Juliette Robinson in her notice of exemption, or the document finding the repealing of the parking program and its business improvement area exempt from CEQ A, Proposition 26 was the ultimate doom of the program.

Proposition 26, the League of California Cities explains, expands the types of local government charges requiring voter approval. It now includes a charge imposed for the costs a local government absorbs for issuing licenses and permits, such as the regulation of a parking program. Because the program was created prior to the proposition’s passing in 2010, the county was forced to stop asking business owners for fees to fund operational costs such as paving, striping and litter pickup thereafter.

Machado said in his Nov. 9 report that while the county could hold an election to try and garner support to start collecting the main fee that helped run the program again, it believes it would lose. When a Soquel Village County Service Area was created in 2016 to offer property owners the option to vote on an annual assessment to support the program, the owners rejected the assessment.

“I don’t think people will miss having to pay for parking there,” he told the Sentinel later.

Other than the removal of a few pay kiosks, the county’s exit will leave its budget largely unaffected. Even the employees who ran the program part-time have moved on to other roles in the Public Works Department, Machado

added in the report.

Other parking projects

This is not the first time this year that the board has taken up a discussion around the viability of one of its parking programs. In April 2021, supervisors directed Public Works staff to meet with the California Coastal Commission and return in six months around the workability of the Live Oak Parking Program. It rejected staff-proposed increased fees for this year — a move that left the program in limbo after widespread resident opposition to being charged to park on the street in front of their homes.

Machado said Wednesday that both parking programs were running at a deficit. In the case of the Soquel Village Parking Program, the county was facing $100,000 of debt because of underperformance.

“We had definitely been going backward for a number of years,” Machado said.

Machado teased that the Live Oak Parking Program will likely face the same future as its sister in Soquel Village.

“The Coastal Commission has continued to state that they would not support a paid parking program, and that one was (losing money) as well,” he said.

Machado anticipates that the language around Live Oak’s program, which used to regulate spots around Pleasure Point, will cease to exist if the board approves deleting its respective county code within the next month or two. The language for supervisors is being drafted now.

“We got very few public comments and concerns about the program not being in place, so we think it’s the right thing for the community as well,” he said.