Sick of competing for street parking with employees from the nearby Point Dume Village Shopping Center, nearby condo residents are petitioning the city to become just the second Malibu neighborhood to have special parking passes.
The Public Works Commission unanimously voted 5-0 on Wednesday of last week to recommend the Malibu City Council implement a parking pass system for streets surrounding two Point Dume condo complexes, on a one-year trial basis.
The proposed system would restrict daytime use of 18 street parking spots along Heathercliff Road and Dume Drive, in front of Heathercliff Condos and Dume View Villas.
“We’re at the whim of employees who have no real reason not to park where it’s most convenient,” said Jonathan Selig, president of the Heathercliff Homeowners Association. He was among six HOA representatives who showed up to support the plan last week.
Malibu has only one other neighborhood parking-pass system: the Malibu Country Estates. MCE requires a pass from 2 a.m.-5:30 a.m. to discourage Pepperdine University students from parking overnight. Residents and commissioners cited similar preferential parking methods in cities like Santa Monica.
The measure passed despite worries that banning public parking during daytime hours might cause employees to park further south on Heathercliff or Wandermere Road and may lead other neighborhoods to petition for parking passes.
“We just don’t want to start something and have everyone come to us for parking pass systems,” Commission Chair Steve Karsh said.
Selig and other tenants at Heathercliff and Dume View Condominiums want to restrict public use of six spaces along Heathercliff Road and 12 spaces on Dume Drive every day from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. The limit would ideally keep workers from leaving their cars on the residential streets during a typical eight-hour shift. Both condo complexes are a short walking distance from the shopping center and provide closer parking than PCH.
Point Dume Village property manager Kathryn Natalia said in an email Monday that the center is working on plans to increase the number of onsite parking spaces for employees, but did not provide details.
“We recently increased onsite parking permits for employees and we encourage and require the other Point Dume Village employees to park on PCH and not on the neighborhood streets,” Natalia wrote.
City of Malibu Public Works Director Bob Brager said his department would likely bring the plan before the City Council after December, due to travel and holiday schedules.
Residents say the street parking battle first began after the grocery store Pavilions opened in 2008, attracting a flood of new customers and employees to the shopping plaza. With most employees barred from parking onsite, residents said they frequently observe many employees parking on Dume or Heathercliff. Encouraging center employees to park on PCH has done very little, they said.
“Although this voluntary program … did move some employees onto PCH, it was not effective enough to eliminate employee parking in front of our condos,” said Lori Kantor, secretary of the Heathercliff HOA.
Under the City of Malibu’s zoning code, officials say the center is 50 spaces under-parked. But because the center was zoned before Malibu became incorporated in 1991, its parking plan was grandfathered into the city.
“Shopping centers that were parked under an existing code [L.A. County] at the time they were constructed are considered legal nonconforming. Legal because they were built according to the code in place at the time and nonconforming because the code changed,” Planning Director Joyce Parker-Bozylinski said Monday.
The ongoing problem makes it hard to host guests, provide additional family parking for relatives and simply go about their daily lives, residents said last week.
“It’s impacting our ability to live the way we’re accustomed to,” Dume View resident Jenny Ogden said.
The 21-unit Heatherclif f Condos sit on the southeast corner of Heathercliff Road and Dume Drive and provide two enclosed, on-site parking spaces for each unit. Seven of those have two additional spots, giving some residents four spaces.
The six-unit Dume View Villas are on the northeast corner of Heathercliff Road and Dume Drive. Each resident of Dume View has a two-car parking garage.
Under the drafted plan, each condo owner would be issued two residential passes and one visitor pass valid for use in any of the designated spaces during restricted hours (81 passes total). The city would have to stripe each spot and ask Volunteers on Patrol to check the daily restriction, Brager said.