Letters to the Editor
Plaza Parking Problem
You may know that the city of University Park is considering removing the parking ratios in Snider Plaza to allow more restaurants to move into empty retail spaces. Many merchants are very concerned that this change will take the Plaza back to the bad old days when there was no control over what type of businesses moved into the center. Restaurants, in particular, are parking intensive and require many spaces for the employees, waiters, and cook staff. They also attract many patrons all at once at peak times. Because most retail spaces in Snider Plaza have no private off-street parking, all those employees and patrons end up parking in the customer parking or neighborhood side streets.
In 2008 Carl Walker and Associates performed the only professional parking study ever done in Snider Plaza and documented that the Plaza has a parking deficit of over 700 spaces. To address this emergency, the first suggestion was to put in parking ratios, which would require businesses with a high parking requirement to provide more parking if they wanted to move into a retail space. This stopped the flood of restaurants in the Plaza that were clogging our customer parking with employees. The new stricter parking ratios are very common in surrounding areas like Highland Park and Uptown to control the mix in a shopping area, so it does not get overrun with restaurant employees.
When the City Council adopted the stricter ratios, they agreed with the parking experts that they were needed and also that they should not ease these parking restrictions until additional off-street parking became available for more employees to use. Until there is a new parking lot or garage in place, it is premature for the City to allow restaurants into retail spaces. Removing the parking ratios will take Snider Plaza back to square one and erase the progress we have made towards fixing the parking problem.
Max Fuqua, Plaza Health Foods
Bush Column Rebuttal
That last column might be useful as an example of thin gruel in a written format. It’s telling that the best you can say of Bush is he can laugh at himself. Better than crying.
Unfortunately, witnessing his shallow loyalty to the Great America he was, literally, an heir to; patriots have long since concluded W. is more a Globalist than AMERICAN. And, as he rejects AMERICANS in practice, his Globalist cronies reject him in public.
But not you, William Taylor. For you, polite Lil’ George is an EXAMPLE! His Defeatist posturing is an inspiration to Republicans…the Losers that gave us two Traitors (McCain & Romney). In this, GWB is their Master. He won to lose.
Christopher Ekstrom, University Park
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