Parallel parking approved

Like so many other things in the world of Boulder City government, the issue of reconfiguring parking in the historic downtown area along Nevada Way, which generated enough heat to cause council members to delay a decision up until the last possible moment, ended with more of a whimper than a bang.

Council voted unanimously Tuesday night to adopt the same parking plan that they seemed to pull away from two weeks earlier.

Dubbed Option 2A, the plan will see the south side of the street (aka the Ace Hardware side) be converted from the current 45-degree head-in parking to parallel parking. The sidewalks on both sides of the street will be widened with the pedestrian walkway pushed to the outside and no longer under the existing porticoes. The covered area along the stretch known as Restaurant Row will be reserved largely for outdoor dining.

In addition to those changes, parking along much of Wyoming Street will be converted from parallel to head-in in order to make up for the spaces being lost on Nevada Way. Public Works Director Gary Poindexter characterized the changes as an overall gain in parking spots.

“So we’re going from a current 106 spaces and under Option 2A that becomes 135,” he said. Expanding on that he said, “So the current number of regular parking slots is 103. It will go down to 94 under Option 2A. Handicap spaces will go from three to six, and motorcycle spaces will go from 0 to 35.” He further explained that parking slots on Wyoming will go from the current 46 up to 59.

“So we do have a loss on the parallel side, but we are picking up the number overall with the motorcycles included,” he said.

What it is actually about

With all of the talk and heat over parking, it is easy to forget that this project had zero to do with parking when the funding from the Regional Transportation Commission was first accepted back in May of 2022. Then and now, the real issue is getting city sidewalks into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The wrinkle has been how to do that and not lose the outdoor dining tables that business owners along that stretch say are crucial for their financial survival.

Adding urgency to the issue (beyond the fact that without a dedicated and unobstructed 48-inch-wide walkway, the city faced significant federal fines under the ADA) was the fact that the Nevada Way and the utilities that run under the street are in serious need of repair.

“The purpose behind this,” Poindexter explained, “Is to replace 23-year-old asphalt that is in poor condition due to wear and traffic and extreme weather. This replaces 50-plus-year-old water services. Eighteen of those water services meet current standards. We’ll install 21 new backflow-prevention devices and replace two mainline water valves. By doing improvements while the street is under construction, it saves us money.”

But it also means getting the design right the first time. One technicality of the RTC funding under its Complete Streets program is that the street can’t be cut into for at least five years.

Poindexter said, “So key benefits to option 2A is the dedicated walkway for clearance and pedestrian movement allowed by the sidewalk extensions. It maintains a 24-foot clearance for emergency vehicles. It provides code-compliant vehicle parking on both sides of the street. It preserves the parade route. It supports outdoor dining opportunities.”

Out of order?

It was an odd meeting in that Mayor Joe Hardy actually called the meeting into recess three different times and then proceeded to recognize two high school teams during the period that state law says is for public comment.

Before doing that for the first time, Hardy quipped, “Is there any other public comment before we do something important?” That comment drew a pained look from Councilman Steve Walton.

A city spokesperson was asked via a text message if handling agendized business during the period set aside for public comment and then never bringing the agenda items up officially during the meeting was legal, she replied that it was. In an email received after the print version of the Review had hit the streets, Lisa LaPlante wrote, “The items in question were recognition of the phenomenal feats of Boulder City High School’s softball and boys swim teams who were waiting in the audience to be recognized. These items are not required by open meeting law to be agendized as there is no deliberation or action taken by the city council. City council is merely noting the accomplishment in the meeting. The city places these recognitions on the agenda so that the background of the accomplishments can be included in the agenda packet. The agendas note that items may be taken out of order.”

“The room was packed, and many attendees waiting to be honored were standing. It was more appropriate to take a recess to take a photo and hand out certificates to allow the teams and their parents to leave immediately after,” LaPlante concluded.

When public comment — as it is meant to be — actually got underway, one speaker commented that they were sure the council had already made up its collective mind on the issue, a comment to which Hardy alluded when he said, “I did appreciate the remark that we’ve already made up our mind and quite frankly we haven’t — as a body. We may have made up our mind up individually, but we don’t want to go to jail, so we haven’t talked to each other about what we’ve decided.”

Comments on social media alleged that the council was meeting Monday in a non-public setting to discuss the plans. That is not what happened. Actually, the Monday before every council meeting, council members are briefed on agenda items by city staff where they can ask questions. But the briefing is actually done as three separate meetings—one for the mayor and two others with two council members in each. This way, there is never a quorum and the city does not fall afoul of state public meeting laws, which are notoriously strict.

Council comments

Addressing the amount of social media commentary this issue has inspired, Councilwoman Denise Ashurst said, “Someone asked me when I walked in today how could I approve something that I don’t know about, and, you know, everybody knows I was in the Air Force and I worked with F-15s. I don’t know how to fix them, I don’t know how to fly them. But I know how to schedule them, and in this case, I have to depend on you guys that know what you’re doing, supposedly.”

Councilwoman Cokie Booth had a different take. “I based my decision on this because I had a bum knee and I got to find out what it was like to walk on some of these sidewalks around Boulder City that are dated and etched and all that kind of stuff. So the accessible walkway to me was important because it’s going to be smooth, it’s going to be colored, and it’s going to have the saw cut in it so that you won’t be tripping. Because sometimes my leg doesn’t quite lift up, and if the concrete is lifted or something like that, it causes me to stumble. So for me it was easy.”

“You know, everything we do — all of the public works projects, utility projects — we’re talking 80 to 90-year-old infrastructure,” Walton noted. “So, I appreciate all we’ve come through as a community to kind of storm through change. Change, the most consistent thing in life, is the hardest thing in life, right? It’s quite the irony, but it is what it is, and we’re dealing with that pretty constantly here in our little community.”

Work on the project is expected to begin on July 7 with a goal of completion by September and before the beginning of the fall event season.