Downtown traffic study, new odor ordinance under council discussion

Many Homewood shoppers and employees have experienced the lack of adequate parking downtown, but the results of a recent traffic study suggest it may be due to failure to enforce parking rules rather than the number of available spaces.

Lindsay Puckett and Mikhail Alert from the Regional Planning Commission of Greater Birmingham attended tonight's city council planning and development committee meeting to present the results of a downtown traffic study performed in April.

The study was the first part of the Central Business District master plan that the RPC is helping the city create. It included public and private parking lots from Central Avenue to Independence Drive in the downtown area. There are 824 city-owned spaces and 1,212 private spaces that the RPC studied.

Their results, based on traffic counts and video monitoring, showed that city spaces averaged about 75 percent full and private spaces about 51 percent occupied. Parking on 18th Street was almost always 100 percent occupied during the 10 a.m.-4 p.m. hours. Ninety percent of the surface lot behind city hall was occupied during that time, while the underground garage's 399 sports were only 40 percent occupied during the day.

Puckett said the two-hour parking time limit is rarely enforced and some cars will occupy spaces all day long, many of which are likely local business employees. She also said shoppers may not be aware of the parking available at the garage.

Within a quarter mile radius, Alert said there are roughly 292 empty public spaces and 120 unoccupied private spaces available, the majority of which are in the underground parking deck and at Regions Tower. The RPC recommended ticketing and enforcement of the two-hour time limit and pursuing the possibility of having businesses validate parking as a way to discourage long-term parking. They also suggested more signs to direct drivers to the underground spaces.

With those changes, Alert said the downtown area could handle its current capacity and absorb some from future construction in the area, such as the planned hotel and retail development on 18th Street, which will also have some new parking of its own.

The planning and development committee decided to table the study to spend more time considering next steps.

At the special issues committee meeting also held tonight, the committee briefly entered executive session to discuss possible litigation as odor issues continue in West Homewood.

Katherine Bazemore of Volatile Analysis, the firm the city council hired to advise and mediate discussions with Buffalo Rock and Dean Foods over ongoing noise and odor complaints, said that Buffalo Rock has not followed the recommended protocols nor provided the data requested of them.

Some new equipment has been installed on the site, without a decrease in odor occurrences. While Volatile Analysis requested data in five-minute increments to see whether the fan system on the site is keeping negative pressure, thereby reducing odor, Bazemore said they received only one set of four-day data from mid-May. The firm also requested data on the carbon bed filtering system, but Bazemore said they received one set of four measurements from December and one sample from March, which is not sufficient to test the system’s effectiveness.

“No scientific company can take one sample and compare to a sample and say we have an accurate picture,” Bazemore said.

After sending Volatile Analysis staff to the site, Bazemore said the company is also not implementing the sniffing and testing protocols that had been outlined for them.

She also said she is working with city attorney Mike Kendrick this week to finalize language for a new ordinance giving the city more enforcement power for public nuisances such as pervasive odors.