Neighbors object to on-street parking

Parking disputes near a church and a downtown restaurant has drawn Columbia Falls police officers and the attention of city manager and city zoning administrator Susan Nicosia.

Nicosia told members of the Columbia Falls City-County Planning Board on Oct. 9 that a man living near the Methodist Church walked up to the microphone during a church service and told parishioners whoever was parked in front of his house had to move. She said that on another occasion, the neighbor blocked vehicles parked in front of his house.

There’s also been disputes over customers to the Basecamp Cafe parking on the side street rather than on Nucleus Avenue.

“While we all try to be good neighbors, in all three of these instances, police assistance was required,” Nicosia said in her planning board report.

The message the police have for the offended neighbors is simple — the rights-away along public streets is city property and people can park there. But that doesn’t make the problem go away, and Nicosia wanted to alert the planning board to how parking figures into planning and zoning.

The city’s zoning regulations stipulate how many off-street parking spaces must be provided by different kinds of businesses in different zoning districts. Professional offices, for example, should are required to provide one space for every 400 square feet of gross floor area, and restaurants under 4,000 total square feet are required to provide one space for every 100 square feet.

The downtown CB-4 downtown zoning district, however, is exempt from parking requirements “due to the surplus of public parking and the historic nature of the district.”

The Methodist Church, which has a conditional-use permit to operate in the CB-4 district, provides some off-street parking, but occasionally there is overflow parking on the street. The Basecamp Cafe is on a small lot on Nucleus Avenue that could not easily provide off-street parking.

“When we conduct a site review with an applicant, we encourage on-site parking, but not all lots are large enough, and it is not required,” Nicosia said. “Parking lots can be expensive to build and to maintain, so it is understandable if they choose not to voluntarily accommodate them.”

Nicosia noted that if the Basecamp Cafe, with 40 percent of its 1,120 square feet used for customer seating, was located in the CB-2 zoning district, it would have been required to provide only four parking spaces.

“Would this have been enough to avoid problems with the residential neighbor across the street?” she asked. “Hard to predict, but I wanted to bring this to the board’s attention. It is not pleasant for either party when police are required to intervene in this area.”