A proposal for a citywide policy on permit parking in residential neighborhoods needs more work before the City Council sees it, Encinitas Planning Commission members said last week.

Higher permit fees and more restrictions on how many permits can be issued per applicant were among their suggested revisions as they considered a draft document produced by the city-hired consulting company Dixon Resources Unlimited. Some planning commissioners also raised concerns about the consultant’s suggestion to outsource enforcement of permit violations.

Commissioner Susan Sherod said she could support hiring a private company to drive the streets and check license plates to determine whether vehicles had the necessary permits to park in a permit-controlled neighborhood. She mentioned that cities already use private contractors to enforce parking meter use in urban areas, but Commissioner Chris Ryan and commission Chair Steve Dalton said they had significant reservations about the proposal and would prefer to have Sheriff’s deputies do it.

“As it relates to outsourcing, I guess I’m nervous,” Dalton said, adding that he knew of a case in Chicago where parking meter enforcement was outsourced “and it became just a complete boondoggle.”

He said that if Encinitas continues to pursue a policy where street parking in some neighborhoods comes with a cost, then “I hope the city is always going to … recoup that cost to us, not pay it off to a private company.”

Ryan said she was concerned about controlling the price that the private contractor might charge to do the work.

Establishing permit parking in residential neighborhoods has been pushed into the forefront of public debate recently because of the number of large, multi-family housing projects now being built in Encinitas. Under state law, onsite parking requirements for new apartment projects are much lower than they used to be and that’s forecasted to eventually create parking woes in surrounding neighborhoods.

Encinitas established its current residential permit parking system in 1998, “primarily as a response to spillover parking impacts from the Scripps Encinitas Hospital,” a city staff report produced for Thursday’s commission meeting states. The city’s first area with permit parking — Zone A — covers the Devonshire Drive region near the hospital. It’s a daytime permit system that aims to control hospital-related parking issues. Later, the city created Zones B and C — two adjacent areas east of Saxony Road’s intersection with Seacrest Way. Those zones sought to control street parking conflicts between single-family homeowners and apartment dwellers.

In 2021, Encinitas established its final permit area — Zone D in the Via Molena region north of Encinitas Boulevard after single-family homeowners in that area mounted an extended campaign to end late-night problems with litter, parties, and illicit behavior. They said their problems drastically escalated after a large apartment complex near them changed ownership and its residents began parking on the streets.

Several people involved in the establishment of Zone D spoke at last week’s meeting and urged the city to consider “quality of life issues” when establishing parking permit areas. They also said that apartment dwellers shouldn’t receive the same number of street parking permits as homeowners, and suggested that permit fees and fees for permit violations be higher.

The city currently charges $5 for the street parking permits in its permit-controlled neighborhoods and distributes an unlimited number of permits based on the number of vehicles residents say they have.

Commissioner Brent Whitteker, who lives in a permit zone, said he strongly supported having high fees for violators of the permit system, saying that if they aren’t “significant,” then there will be “an endless attempt to circumvent the regulations.”

Planning commissioners also said they could support higher permit fees, including creating a structured pricing system where the first two permits per household are cheaper than a third or fourth one. However, they said, creating different permit requirements for apartments verses single-family homes would be a problem because state officials have previously said this could be discriminatory. Perhaps, the commissioners suggested, the City Council could consider basing the number of permits on a per-bedroom basis.

Visit https://encinitas.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?view_id=7&clip_id=3357&meta_id=177486 to view the consultant’s draft report.