Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 (Agenda)
Item 30
Let's try to get to the number 30 then go to the public private partnership, judge shepherd.
30 is to consider and take appropriate action on recommendation to maintain the 700 lavaca garage as a zoned facility for county employees for an additional six months including a, upstate on pilot, b implementation of trial period, and c, revisions to current policy.
>> good morning, judge, Commissioners.
employee parking committee.
in preparation for the employees moving into the 700 lavaca building on Friday, we wanted to bring back to the court update on the pilot as well as to get some direction on parking as it will be assigned in that garage.
the pilot was approved by the court on September 21 of 2010 and will expire on July 1 of this year 2011.
we had the first employee parking or assigned parking on October 4.
the information that we used for the backup was as of March.
that is what we had from the property manager.
and we had approximately 7 05 people parking at that time and that includes the tenants as well as pilot parkers and that information was detailed in the backup for you.
but what we notice, lessons learned, was that the pilot was not keeping pace with the tenants moving out as well as the available spaces there.
basically people were leaving or employees were not accepting as fast as spaces became available.
so we are coming back to the court to tell you that we have surveyed the employees that were in the pilot, and most of those employees had a favorable response to the survey, saying they didn't have problems parking, of course, it's not full at that point so they wouldn't have.
but also that we had a few that were concerned about proximity to their workplace.
it was difficult for them.
we took this survey right after the know days.
so it wasn't particularly cold.
and people were not please that had they had to walk several blocks to get to the workplace.
those were the two biggest factors in the survey pointed out.
also, we did remove between 195 and 198 employees from the wait list that are assigned in that garage.
so we did notice that we are able to positively impact employees that are on the wait list in using the parking.
so as far as the parking committee is concerned, this is the way to maximize our resources.
even though the space is not a hundred percent utilized as we had planned.
so what we are proposing is that as of the employees start officing in the building, that we continue to use that garage as a parking facility and not to assign numbers as we do in the granger garage.
we spoke with facilities management and it's our understanding that he preferred the garage stay zoned as well because we do have paid tenants in that garage.
and this makes it easier for him to manage the county employees in the garage as well as the paid tenants parking situation in that garage.
if we leave that garage parking as we are recommending, we did have some decisions that the court would have to direct us on.
one is how we would handle the zoned parking over there.
if we would use one or two zones.
currently we have one in which all the employees are parking in undesignated spaces at this time.
but as you start to move offices over, if you want to have the court or executives or county executives have reserve spaces, is an option to do that and the court would have to direct us to do that now.
we are not currently doing that.
there is space to do that, so we need to hear from the court what they would prefer in that regard.
we suggest that we come back and revisit in six months, so we would leave the employees and pilot parkers in that space until that six months is expired.
and we to have the opportunity if the garage is still not full, if we want to really test and push the boundaries of the zone parking to offer additional parking to employees without the promise of a parking space after that point, and those employees would just basically have free, paing for that six-month period and go back to the wait list and they had previously.
are there questions at this time?
>> I have a question with regard to the specified positions.
in my experience having been in the pilot, because of the way that garage is constructed and how it connects to the building, it occurs me, unlike the granger garage where there is a clear preference on the first floor, there's rational for preference from floor to floor in that building.
because no matter what floor you park on, you have to get an elevator to get to the sub level to get into the building.
so what would be the rational of having specified parking as opposed to leaving everyone zoned.
>> our recommend , ation, right to the heart of the meater, it is to leave a single zone.
from the employee surveys it was clear most employees prefer everyone to be treated the same.
clearly we understand that may not be the real world situation and court may have a differ preference so there is the availability to have two zones, one where you would leave those specified positions with designated parking or ease of finding a space, basically.
and a second zone for all others.
>> okay.
and with regard to the specified positions, I do also have a concern because we do have a tendency to go to mission creep.
I did notice in some of the attached documents that there are more anticipations than warm bodies in some of these offices.
more spaces assigned than warm bodies in some of the offices.
that does concern me with regard to specified physician parking, particularly if light of the fact that as a specified position, I come and go a great deal.
so seems like just in terms of analogy to a health insurance pool, I am a healthy parker for which other people can benefit from the fact that I come and go a lot as part of my job.
if you take me out of that pool and put me in a reserve spot, you're losing that elasticity, which I would prefer to maintain the elastic parkers in the pool because that improves the performance of the pool.
>> remind me how we distinguish between reserved park forg tenants there now and the zoned parking.
>> currently tenants with reserved parking on floors two and three in that garage.
and they actually have an assigned space.
so they are numbered.
>> numbered.
>> and they pay extra in their lease for those spaces.
>> okay.
move approval of the three recommendations.
>> second.
>> I guess there really would be two, b and c.
>> exactly.
>> a is simply the update.
>> exactly.
>> and we will just leave to another day the decision of what to do with specified spaces.
>> right.
to be clear, we are asking if you leave the garage zoned, which is what we are hoping, only the specified in the zone, one for elected official, one for county executive moving into that counti, and if at some point one is assigned from the courts, that would be the one space for the judge, parking completely expects end of April or may to put the draft policy included here out for comment from the entire county so that people can give us their feedback on what those specified positions spaces look like.
I'm sure there will be a lot of feed on those people no longer recommended for specified position.
then would come back to the court in June to have the policy actually adopted.
>> may I make a comment, that maybe germane to the motion but certainly germane to bringing the policy back.
with regard to 11.007 a 6, I would like the parking committee to consider a change in terminology from specified position spaces to specified position zones.
that may be a way to split the baby.
take a floor and make it the specified positions floor so you still get the elasticity benefi.
>> one, just to the court is clear, we could actually do a specified zone in which case you can either do an assignment by one to one or limit the amount of oversell they are using in that particular zone.
that is completely in line with the definition of a zone, yes.
>> I would think that the specified positions could probably be oversold to greater degree than the regular zone because of the high elasticity in those specified positions.
>> motion would be to cover the details set for the in the backup, I guess.
>> okay.
>> is that all right?
>> yes.
>> mr. Bradford, any revelations today?
>> right now just window dressing.
>> most attractive.
>> thank you vana.
>> discussion on the motion.
all in favor.
that passes by unanimous vote.
thank you all very much.
>> thank you.
pleasure visiting with you.
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