`PORT ANGELES — The Port Angeles Downtown Association is without 129 long-term parking spaces downtown for employees and business owners.
The parking spaces haven’t disappeared.
They changed ownership, and the details of renting them out again haven’t been worked out yet.
Most downtown parking spaces have two-hour limits, so businesses rent parking spaces for their employees from the downtown association, which for years has managed the downtown public parking lots.
The shortage doesn’t affect those businesses that paid for all 12 months of employee parking at the beginning of the year.
It affects only those who rent parking spaces for their employees from month to month.
“Our supply of parking spaces has been reduced,” said Kevin Thompson, owner of Family Shoe Store, the downtown association’s president.
“Those businesses buying monthly parking permits can’t for November, so we are in a bit of a bind.”
City sold lots
The issue is just the latest of several current concerns for the downtown association, which lost its executive director last month.
The employee parking shortage arose when the city sold three parking lots that included 129 long-term parking spaces to Clallam Transit System for the Port Angeles International Gateway Transportation Center project.
The $13.8 million Gateway Center project — a bus staging area that is also expected to include a public plaza, clock tower and two-level parking garage — is slated for an area roughly bounded by Front Street and Railroad Avenue at Lincoln Street.
Gateway will go to bid in mid- to late January after the final permits are issued, with construction expected to be completed in 2008.
Clallam Transit has contracted with Heckman Motors to manage the lots until Gateway construction starts but owner Jim Heckman is on vacation right now.
“We are negotiating now with the city to decide what to do in the interim and long term,” Thompson said.
“We will come to a solution. It is a matter of how, who and when,” he said.
In the meantime, employees have been carpooling, not bringing their cars to work or finding parking elsewhere outside the downtown, Thompson said.
