Residents Resist Parking Restrictions

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By Cassandra Reinhart | LB Indy

A narrow stretch of Alta Vista Way ends in a long dead-end
A narrow stretch of Alta Vista Way ends in a long dead-end

This time of year, Lynn Barclay watches the whales on Sunday afternoons from her deck overhanging Alta Vista Way. She also watches something else.

“I can tell you, sitting where I sit, when there is a fire I watch the fire trucks come up and they struggle,” Barclay said. “To watch them try to navigate their way up this road is really scary.”

Currently charged with a plan to improve accessibility to 16 Laguna Beach neighborhoods, the Emergency and Disaster Preparedness Committee (EDPC) is gathering input on how to improve emergency access while not completely eliminating residential street parking in those neighborhoods. People in the Alta Vista neighborhood, a steep, winding, narrow roadway skewing off of Solana Way, are upset they are being targeted first.

“The impact of this proposal is immediate and dire,” a group of 38 Alta Vista area residents wrote to the Indy last week in a letter to the editor. “Many residents are elderly or physically handicapped and would not be able to park on their own streets. A few homes have no garage, which would mean hiking to and from Coast Highway for their car, more than a quarter-mile uphill.”

Danny Marens and Barbara Bowman live at 668 Alta Vista Way. Marens has a driveway, and a garage. But says some of his neighbors are not as lucky, and the proposed parking restrictions have a ripple effect.

“It’s not a good idea,” Marens said. “It’s a winding street so there are very few parking spaces, so they have to go to other streets, Iris and Juanita. So it’s not fair to them.”

EDPC member Matt Lawson says residents are creating the impression that Alta Vista permanent parking restrictions are happening suddenly, and that is not the case. He says the EDPC’s initial proposals are still being revised based on resident feedback from multiple meetings that began last fall and will not advance without City Council review and approval. “This program is being developed in the most transparent way possible,” Lawson said.

Lawson says the emergency access improvement program was initiated in 2015 in an effort to improve emergency access on streets where medical and fire response is particularly difficult. While Bluebird Canyon, Canyon Acres and Diamond Crestview were identified as the town’s most restricted areas, fire personnel identified the so-called  “alphabet streets” off of Alta Vista as the most difficult. They were selected as the initial pilot site to restrict parking to improve emergency access after EDPC members did a ride along through the narrow neighborhoods on fire trucks.

“All these streets off of Alta Vista are dead-end streets. No cul-de-sacs and they just stop,” Fire Chief Jeff LaTendresse said. “When any kind of large vehicle goes in there there is no where to turn around.”

Most of the 14 mostly dead-end streets in the Alta Vista neighborhood do not conform to today’s fire codes. Current fire code says streets need to be 20-feet wide with no street parking, 28-feet wide for parking on one side, and 36-feet wide for parking on both sides. Fire hydrants need a 40-foot wide access point. LaTendress says Alta Vista and its dead-end branches are far from those measurements.

“Some of them are as narrow as 12 feet wide, some get wider into the 20-foot areas. So when we have streets that are substandard like that it makes our access difficult,” LaTendresse said.

The EDPC has developed a list of eight different options other than simply eliminating parking. Some of them include cutting back vegetation, growing the right-of-way a foot or two and paving over some dirt areas to provide better access.

“The city does so much to accommodate tourist parking,” write the 38 Alta Vista residents in their letter. “We, as residents and taxpayers, deserve equal consideration and the right to preserve our way of life. ‘No Parking’ signs are very inexpensive, but the impact on residents is tremendous.”

“There is a list of things we are trying to do before we just limit parking,” LaTendresse said. “We are trying to do more as a city than just telling the residents you can’t park here.”

More meetings will be held before any permanent recommendations are even made. The EDPC will hear updates on the project on March 6.

“I understand the concept they want to make it a better quality of life and safer, but in reality, it doesn’t work that way because of the actual pattern of the street,” Maren said. “There has never been a problem with a fire truck, and I have lived here for decades.”

Lawson, who has seen the restricted fire access first-hand from the seat of a fire truck, disagrees.

“One option we need to guard against is doing nothing,” Lawson said. “All of us who live in access-impaired neighborhoods are at unnecessary risk if emergency responders are delayed when seconds make the difference between life and death.”

 

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3 COMMENTS

  1. No one should be able to park on the street unless they can prove their garage can accommodate their car and not be filled with their “stuff”.

  2. How ’bout a much simpler solution: Laguna Beach Fire Department purchases a much SMALLER firetruck…one that doesn’t require a full block to park and a two blocks to turn?

    Wouldn’t it be easier to change the firetruck NOT the streets and parking for these residents?

    Didn’t I read somewhere that the city of Laguna has $7 MILLION extra in the “kitty” more than they projected…????

  3. Some older homes don’t have a garage or a driveway and some homes have a one car garage but have 2 cars, the 2nd car needs to park somewhere. It took several meetings, neighborhood push back and correspondences with Lawson, the Captain and the committee to alter the course of the pilot program. Initially, we were lead to believe that we did not have a choice, “Los Angeles did it” (on rural, 2-3 mile long streets with one way out, backing to National Forest, large lots with 2+ garages and big driveways). And, I was told, after the Chamber of Commerce meeting by Lawson, with witnesses, that, “the City owns the streets and they can do what ever they want” in addition to other obstructive comments and gestures. Based on this article, their approach has softened significantly and we are pleased that they are listening. Thank you. My comment re access impaired is that this whole city is seriously access impaired, ask people who were here in 1993 and had to evacuate. I was driving on the North bound stretch of Temple Hills, at the bottom, sitting in bumper to bumper traffic, barely moving, with a car full of children, staring at quickly moving flames moving towards us, Southward from Temple Terrace, burning one home after the next, there was no where to go and we did not see any emergency vehicles or a fire truck in sight. Could you imagine if we had an emergency on a warm summer day when the city is at maximum capacity with tourism as it is on most weekends? Gridlock, Emergency vehicles can’t go anywhere. How about limiting the number of cars coming into town in the summer time, like Newport Peninsula does? Just Kidding. Also, per the Fire Dept website, there is only 1 fire fighter, 1 Captain, and 1 engineer on duty full time at each of the 4 stations, in addition Glenneyre has a 2 person ambulance crew and S. LB has a paramedic unit which also services Lag Niguel and DP. I feel that there are much bigger issues to deal with than removing 85 parking spaces, an extreme inconvenience for the whole neighborhood and tax payers, on streets accessed, maybe once or twice a year, by the emergency vehicles for the past 90 years, with the existing larger vehicles, 8’3″ to 9’9″, size per research and City website. Access may not be as convenient as they would like it to be, and backing out on cul-de-sacs takes some practice, like the garbage men do. If the Committee, fire and police Dept thinks the vehicles need more room to improve access then, purchase different vehicles and or straighten the jagged and narrow streets so they are like the newer streets in town, paid for by tax payers.

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