Opinion: Parking Isn’t Optional in Community Planning

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I believe we all have great concern for the health of our planet. I commend you for taking all reasonable and effective actions to counter the effects of climate change.

However, there are steps that achieve nearly nothing towards that shared goal, and have the capacity to make our city demonstrably less tranquil and pleasant.

This act of yours to offer no resistance to the elimination of well-planned communities by eliminating minimum parking code only removes our ability to utilize our best science and studies in creating a truly livable community.

Please don’t collude in removing a vital tool from our community planning toolbox. Parking isn’t optional in community planning. It isn’t something we can leave up to the whims of a property developer. 

I spent years pouring over development plans submitted by developers as a City of Tigard Planning Commissioner. The one nearly consistent element and theme of each and every submission was the MEETING, but rarely exceeding, of quality of life code requirements. 

Developers, and humans generally, don’t willfully give away money they don’t need to. 

Those developers may provide SOME parking, in SOME cases. But the ratios good science recommends will no longer apply, and the community supply will demonstrably diminish.

Join the lawsuit against this over reach by Executive Order into clearly a Legislative concern. But not for that reason. Do it because the livability of our community is your primary charge, and this code elimination is NOT worth the degradation of that livability in trade for such a minuscule return for air quality and community emissions. 

Make GOOD trades for the environment. This isn’t that.

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