ST. GEORGE — Santa Clara City Council invited members of the public to discuss the one-way entrance into the parking lot at Gubler Park at their Wednesday work meeting.
The one-way entrance has caused mayhem at the parking lot and in surrounding neighborhoods due to drivers exiting the wrong way and speeding through the parking lot, community members said. Citizens asked the council to make some changes, ranging from traffic spikes, to speed bumps, to turning the lot into a two-way driveway.
After a lengthy discussion, the council asked city officials to investigate costs and solutions and make a presentation at a later meeting.
The traffic in the parking lot has been causing issues for a number of years, residents said. A number of solutions were discussed, each with its downsides as well.
“I don’t want to redesign the whole parking lot,” Councilman Jarett Waite said at the meeting. “We’d just have to restripe it and tear stuff out, I would rather see how council feels about speed bumps in just the right spot, maybe near the entrance.”
One resident urged the council to consider traffic spikes, which they referred to as a tire-shredder.
“I say this with a lot of hesitation because I’ve tangled with a tire-shredder,” she said. “But if you want to keep people from going the wrong way, you need to take an action like this that will make them stop.”
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Members of the council and city staff said they were leaning away from traffic spikes because of the danger it would present to children riding their bikes or running in the area. Another resident suggested regularly stationing a police officer at the parking lot. Police Captain Rich Rodgers said the police department has too many parking lots to monitor and not enough officers to manage all of them.
“It’s virtually impossible for our station, the size that it is, to have a person up there all the time,” he said. “We have had officers go up there several times.”
Rodgers said when he’s caught people exiting the wrong way, they’ve been residents of the surrounding neighborhoods trying to get home. He added that speed bumps would be an effective way to slow drivers down depending on the design of the parking lot.
In other business, the council also discussed an amendment to an ordinance that would allow gated communities to be built. Currently under the ordinance, gated communities and private streets are not legally allowed in planned development zones. The council was split on the issue and decided to revisit it at a later meeting.
“I’m really concerned about private streets,” Councilwoman Leina Mathis said. “I think we’re setting ourselves up for unintended consequences … I was open to having a discussion about a gated community with the single-owner idea, only because then it’s restricted to just one person and potentially that would limit the number of these types of developments.”
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