PORT ANGELES — The tax-based Parking and Business Improvement Area that 154 Port Angeles downtown businesses pay for should be abolished and replaced with a more broadly focused organization such as a Business Improvement Area, a top business leader said Wednesday.
Marc Abshire, executive director of the Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce, floated the proposal at a chamber monthly breakfast meeting attended by nine participants, including five board members of the Port Angeles Downtown Association (PADA), which administers the PBIA.
Abshire said the organization should “start again new,” suggesting it become a Business Improvement Area, which under state law includes parking as a purpose, but not the only one.
Marilyn Parrish, the vice president of the downtown association, who was at the meeting, said afterward that now is not the time to change course and that the PADA’s focus is already comprehensive, according to its own bylaws.
“I think it’s something that may be good for further discussion,” said Parrish, also a marketing representative for the Peninsula Daily News.
“But just to say ‘Kill the PADA and start something new,’ no, I’m not excited about that.’”
City Attorney Bill Bloor said in a later interview that the change to a Business Improvement Area would require city council approval.
Quarterly PBIA fees are assessed to businesses based on square footage and routed through the city finance department to PADA, which — according to PADA bylaws — pays for business promotions and other retail trade activities.
The payment totaled $36,178 in 2016, acting city Finance Director Tess Agesson said Wednesday.
She said entrepreneurs pay an average of about $200 a year to fund the PBIA.
Abshire said the Downtown Association “needs to stop and start again new, needs to be branded differently, needs to be thought-out differently, needs to be a BIA and not a PBIA.”
He said later he does “not presume to have all the answers,” he said later, adding he would support PADA regardless of what direction it takes.
Abshire said the original purpose of PADA, established in 1985, remains providing and maintaining adequate parking for downtown businesses according to city ordinance, although that responsibility now belongs to the city.
“The rate structure needs a lot of work,” he said of the PBIA as administered by PADA.
“The whole idea of what the boundaries are needs to be taken a look at,” Abshire said, suggesting that those boundaries could be extended from the downtown core east up U.S. Highway 101.
“The area could use a lot of attention with marketing campaigns and advertising,” he added.
He said the time is ripe for the change with the Dec. 31 end of the contract with the state Main Street Program, administered by the state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation.
That will require the PADA, which exited the Main Street Program in a board vote Monday, to forward invoices to the city for payment instead of directly receiving PBIA taxes, Abshire said.
The PADA stopped maintaining city parking areas in 2015, giving over that responsibility to city of Port Angeles.
“We had done an audit previously and some of the things that were needing to be done needed to be taken over,” Agesson said.
Under Abshire’s plan, the PADA would continue to exist and would not merge with the chamber, Abshire said.
But it would “reinvent itself, just take several steps back and conduct a strategic planning exercise in the coming months and come up with a purpose for a BIA with well-defined goals,” he said.
“The point is really a matter of focus and baggage, and starting something different from what’s been going on for 32 years,” he said.
Parrish said PADA is still part of the National Main Street Program and that its bylaws already provide for a broad scope of activities.
The city ordinance covering the PBIA says the purpose of the PBIA is to provide for adequate parking and fulfill other purposes authorized under a state law.
According to that state law, those purposes include sponsorship of public events, decoration of public places and furnishing music, which Parrish said PADA already does.
“I think we are doing some good things downtown,” she said.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 55650, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
