Requiem for a Public Square

By Rick Longinotti

 The great towns of the world have gathering spaces at their center. The public squares in Monterey and Watsonville are a legacy of this Spanish version. Throughout the years there have been efforts to create a public plaza in Santa Cruz. The popular Abbott Square is the closest approximation to a public square in the heart of Downtown. The square is appropriately named for Chuck Abbott, whose advocacy for a “Downtown Oasis” resulted in the Pacific Garden Mall, turning Pacific Ave. into a meandering one-way street amid shade trees and brick planter boxes that provided plenty of seating. (Sentinel 9/11/18)

Every Wednesday afternoon, the City’s parking lot #4 has transformed into a de facto public plaza hosting the Farmers Market under the grand magnolia trees. The imminent demise of this public space traces back to December 2016 when City staff proposed a 5 story 640 space parking garage with a new library as a ground-floor tenant.

This was an about-face from the direction the City was headed just six months earlier when the City contracted Nelson\Nygaard to consult on parking Downtown. The consultant practiced the parking management principles pioneered by Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking. 

Why the reversal? In June 2016 voters passed a library tax. The City Manager at the time wanted to leave a legacy library. He knew the tax was insufficient to build a new library. But sharing construction costs with a parking garage made the project seem feasible. 

The contract with Nelson\Nygaard called for the consultant to present its findings to the City Council. That presentation never happened. That may be explained because the report did not recommend a new garage. Instead, it recommended a number of parking management strategies to make better use of existing parking.

In 2019 the City Council voted 4-3 (over staff opposition) to implement one of those strategies: bus passes for all workers Downtown. Also against staff opposition, the Council invited Patrick Siegman, formerly of Nelson\Nygaard, to speak to the Council on his study of parking in the Downtown. Siegman told the Council that the annual parking census showed a steady decline in parking Downtown, in line with the experience of cities nationwide, due to telecommuting, Uber/Lyft, and online retail..  “Santa Cruz has a parking management problem, not a parking supply problem,” stated Siegman. At the same study session, UCSC professor and parking researcher Adam Millard Ball told the Council, “It’s cheaper to pay commuters not to drive than to build more parking.” 

 In 2018 the consultant, Economic Planning Systems, analyzed City staff projections for paying debt on the garage and reported that the staff model “does not evaluate a worst-case scenario (for parking revenues) where a major recession occurs or a technological change (and pricing) substantially reduces parking demand.” 

The consultant’s warning didn’t take long to prove accurate. In 2020 the pandemic hit. Parking revenues plummeted. Recovery has been slow. The Parking District has run a deficit every year since the pandemic. Nevertheless, at their meeting on Tuesday, April 22, 2025 meeting the City Council approved 30 year bond debt to build the garage. 

By approving the 30 year bond debt the City Council is betting that neither recessions nor robotaxis, nor tele-commuting, nor online retail will slow parking revenue. If the bet is mistaken, the City’s General Fund is on the hook for the annual debt payments. When I called the Council’s attention to that fact, the Mayor asked the Finance Director if that was true. She affirmed that it was.

Facing the need to win public support, City staff repeatedly reduced the proposed parking in order to add affordable housing. The final version includes 243 parking spaces and 124 units of affordable housing. 

 As Downtown business owner Curt Simmons warned in a Sentinel guest editorial  (April 28, 2020), the Parking District faces a possible downward spiral. If revenues don’t meet expenditures, the City will likely raise parking rates, which reduces demand for parking, which reduces revenue (not to mention its impact on businesses). Trust in local government faces a possible downward spiral too. If voters discover the City’s gamble was unwise, will they vote to tax themselves to support City tax measures? The lost opportunity for a town square under the magnolias might not be the only casualty of the parking garage.

Rick Longinotti is chair of the Campaign for Sustainable Transportation

For the back story on Nelson\Nygaard’s conflict with the City, see “An Honest Consultant”