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11-03-2009 City Council Study Session PacketCity of Grand Island Tuesday, November 03, 2009 Study Session Packet City Council:Mayor: Margaret Hornady City Administrator: Jeff Pederson City Clerk: RaNae Edwards T u 7:00:00 PM Council Chambers - City Hall 100 East First Street Larry Carney Scott Dugan John Gericke Peg Gilbert Chuck Haase Robert Meyer Mitchell Nickerson Bob Niemann Kirk Ramsey Jose Zapata Call to OrderCity of Grand Island City Council A - SUBMITTAL OF REQUESTS FOR FUTURE ITEMS Individuals who have appropriate items for City Council consideration should complete the Request for Future Agenda Items form located at the Information Booth. If the issue can be handled administratively without Council action, notification will be provided. If the item is scheduled for a meeting or study session, notification of the date will be given. B - RESERVE TIME TO SPEAK ON AGENDA ITEMS This is an opportunity for individuals wishing to provide input on any of tonight's agenda items to reserve time to speak. Please come forward, state your name and address, and the Agenda topic on which you will be speaking. MAYOR COMMUNICATION This is an opportunity for the Mayor to comment on current events, activities, and issues of interest to the community. Call to Order Pledge of Allegiance Roll Call This is an open meeting of the Grand Island City Council. The City of Grand Island abides by the Open Meetings Act in conducting business. A copy of the Open Meetings Act is displayed in the back of this room as required by state law. The City Council may vote to go into Closed Session on any agenda item as allowed by state law. City of Grand Island City Council Item -1 Presentation of Web Site Conversion Over the past year the city undertook measures to increase communication and responsiveness to residents through expanded use of technology. Specifically the Grand Island City Council approved a partnership with Vision Internet for the redevelopment of the City’s website, grand-island.com. Known in the industry as the Government Website Experts, Vision Internet exceeded their reputation providing superior support and guidance throughout the duration of the project. This support coupled with the background knowledge and hard work of the Grand Island staff has made for an outstanding collaboration. In the not too distant future, residents and staff members alike will experience the benefits of this hard work. The City’s new website will officially be unveiled and launched at the next City Council meeting held on November 3. The implementation of Vision’s Content Management System streamlines the City’s internal updating process. The system is extremely user friendly, allowing both technical and non- technical savvy staff members to make updates. Through training provided by Vision Internet and the Website Rebuild Committee, approximately 50 staff members can now create and take ownership of their specific department’s web content instead of just three employees who previously were in charge of website maintenance. Decentralizing the updating tasks will lighten individual staff members’ work load. For website visitors this means more information that is timely and accurate on a more frequent basis. The new site also offers many new dynamic and interactive features that the old site did not have the capabilities of. Examples include: an e-notification tool, ability to produce forms and surveys that citizens can now submit online, online polling, an “In the Spotlight” featured area on the front page, Emergency Notification that can be showcased on the front page when needed, a Document Central location, and a city-all calendar that offers different search options according to departments and categories. One of the great features of the Vision Content Management System is that it also allows for the future scheduling of content publications and provides an automatic expiration feature. Visitors can trust that what they are reading is accurate. Several third party vendors have also been easily incorporated into the new look of the site. The Citizen Request Management System allows City officials to better analyze needs and trends while increasing the amount of work accomplished by staff. The system includes numerous features, including automatic reports describing the status of citizen requests, customer satisfaction surveys, and follow-up communications to citizens offering superior customer service and responsiveness. The Grand Island Video TourBook is also a new Tuesday, November 03, 2009 Study Session City of Grand Island City of Grand Island City Council feature that has 10 various videos that showcase the Grand Island community. The Human Resources Department, as well as the Police Department, both have interactive new tools in place on the website to help better meet the needs of residents. Throughout the last eight months the Website Rebuild Committee has strived to create a site that had a primary focus on municipality services, resources, and activities, but also felt it was important to have a well-rounded site that encompassed several different entities in the community. The new navigation headers “I Want To,” “Residents,” and “Business,” all offer links and information on an assortment of community resources that citizens and visitors will find extremely helpful. The overall look and feel of the website’s design has also seen a dramatic change. A great deal of thought and time was put into the new design. Images of the community have been updated and a more intuitive navigational map has been put in place. The designers and staff members have worked hard to keep the website in sync with the City’s vision of becoming easier to access and to become more interactive with citizens; all while keeping in mind to reflect what is unique to Grand Island. With easily-accessible online services, timely information updates and a fresh, vibrant design, the new site is one of the city’s newest efforts in being responsive to the community needs. Staff Contact: Wendy Meyer-Jerke City of Grand Island City Council Item -2 Discussion Concerning Downtown Metered Parking Program Tuesday, November 03, 2009 Study Session City of Grand Island Staff Contact: Steve Lamken City of Grand Island City Council Council Agenda Memo From: Steven Lamken, Police Chief Meeting: November 3, 2009 Study Session Subject: Metered Parking Program Item #’s: 2 Presenter(s): Steven Lamken, Police Chief Background The Police Department does not believe there is a demonstrated need for metered parking monitoring in downtown Grand Island. The Police Department is recommending that the Council discontinue the Metered Parking Program. The purpose of metered parking is to turn over the availability of parking stalls for customers of businesses. This is statutorily based upon parking congestion; or the lack of available parking. The City has ordinances that have established metered parking on streets in the downtown area and in one City owned parking lot called the Chamber of Commerce lot. The City does issue some people permits to park in the Chamber lot over the two hour limit. The current metered parking program is a parking stall rental program and regulation is conducted by monitoring. A primary function of the Police Department is law enforcement. The Police Department is not managing a parking enforcement program with metered parking. We are managing a parking rental system. The need for metered parking was more critical when downtown was the primary retail shopping area in the City. The current retail base in downtown tends to be specialized businesses that do not draw large numbers of customers at one time. Congestion of retail customer parking in the Downtown area is not a problem based upon the Police Department’s study of parking in the area. Discussion Study The Department reviewed 26 days of metered parking monitoring that was conducted from September of 2008 into January of 2009. The majority of the days were in November and December of 2008. In addition, the Police Department staff conducted visual parking audits of the Downtown parking for a two month period. The following is a summary of the data and visual observations. · The turnover of employer/employee parking appears to be a bigger problem than customer parking. Parking monitoring is conducted in a targeted manner often at locations where employers or employees of downtown businesses chose to use two hour metered parking for their own parking. · There is adequate on street parking capacity. The monitoring reports did not show any block in downtown that did not have vacant parking stalls available. No block was used at 100% capacity. Staff observations correlate to the monitoring reports. The monitoring reports and observations by staff show that it is a small percentage of the time, 12.2% where over 50% of the parking stalls are occupied in any given block. Blocks that have higher customer parking needs such as 3rd Street from Wheeler to Walnut do not have high parking rental violation counts. This indicates that customers in the downtown area are not creating major problems with violation of metered parking. Staff observations also show a turnover of vehicles parked on this block. The Police Department does not receive complaints of inadequate customer parking. Customer use of parking is turning over. The Department reviewed rental violations issued during the twenty six days. The following summary provides information regarding the violations. A significant percentage of rental violations are employers or employees of businesses using metered parking. This is an issue of self discipline and employer policy and control as to where they and employees park. Private businesses with their own parking regulate employer/employee parking in their lots through workplace policy. The same can be done in downtown. There are ample parking places in City parking lots for employer/employees that would require no more walking than many employees and customers do now in retail business parking lots. · Violation Summary On Street Parking 223 - Number of violations issued over the 26 days 32 - Number of extended parking violations (More than one rental violation issued to the same vehicle parked in the same stall for extended time) 18 - Number of vehicles receiving multiple rental violations on separate days. 61 - Number of rental violations issue to the above 18 vehicles. (A high of 10 violations on one vehicle) 27% - Percent of total rental violations being issued to18 vehicles. Chamber Lot 30 - Number of times monitor checked the lot over the 26 days 49 - Number of rental violations issued over the 26 days 9 - Number of rental violations that were for extended parking (More than one rental violation issued to the same vehicle parked in the same stall for extended time) · Long Term Parking Lots The City provides numerous long term off street parking lots in the downtown area. These lots are located within one and one half blocks of most businesses in the downtown area. Observations show that there is ample unused capacity in these lots. No long term lot was observed to be full during the observation period. There was unused capacity in the two hour time limit Chamber of Commerce lot during all monitor enforcement and staff observations. · The metered parking program requires costs and resources in the Police Department that could be used by the City more efficiently in other areas of service that are higher priority. Issues Downtown business employers/employees may not exercise the necessary controls and self discipline to regulate their use of on street parking thus perhaps negatively affecting their neighboring businesses. The business dynamics of downtown may change and create higher customer parking demands and a need for customer parking turnover. Such dynamics do not now exist. Conclusion This item is presented to the City Council in a Study Session to allow for any questions to be answered and to create a greater understanding of the issue at hand. It is the intent of City Administration to bring this issue to a future council meeting.