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Mermaid Staff Report September 22, 2008 Page 3 subdivide and sell a piece of their property to a developer who plans to build a 14,000 square foot, five store retail mall. This proposed addition of retail to the site requires the City to amend the Mermaid’s PUD Agreement to allow this new use. The addition of a retail center to one of the most prominent corners in the city would initially seem to be a good fit. The primary issue with this proposal is parking – both for the existing Mermaid and the new retail building. By adding a building to the site, many of the existing parking spaces will be lost and the new stores will generate additional parking needs. Staff required that a parking study be included with the application for this PUD Amendment. The Mermaid has made some interior changes since the PUD and parking requirements were originally approved in 2000. In the last few years, the downstairs night club has been removed with additional banquet space put in its place, and the size of the restaurant was reduced and an arcade area added. The city code does not address complementary uses when determining parking requirements. The code only states “this specific use requires this number of parking spaces,” whereas staff realizes that in this situation for example, people staying at the hotel also may be using the banquet room and the arcade. The parking study is included in this staff report. There also are other issues to keep in mind when determining whether the parking would be adequate for the new retail use. The Mermaid sets up a 4,200 square foot temporary tent for 180 days each spring through fall as additional banquet space. When the City approved the Interim Use Permit for the tent in March 2005, it was determined that the existing parking available on the site was adequate. This IUP was only approved for five years, which means that they will need to reapply for another IUP in March 2010. The consultant who did the parking study included the temporary tent (called the “courtyard”) into the parking requirements, whereas the City approved the IUP without requiring any additional parking. Another issue is that the Mermaid is currently leasing a number of their parking spaces near County Highway 10 to Metro Transit for a Park & Ride. The parking study does not address this as an existing use, so one could assume that the Mermaid will be discontinuing the leasing agreement if the city approves the subdivision and PUD Amendment. In 2000, when the PUD was approved for the hotel addition, the PUD Agreement stated that 808 parking stalls were required for the site. There are currently 760 stalls existing on the Mermaid site. The proposed 1.4 acre lot would remove 193 stalls from the Mermaid’s property, but the new retail construction would add 87 stalls back. This would equal a total of 654 parking stalls on both the Mermaid and new retail center property. The developer is proposing to share parking with the Mermaid, and is using 87 of the Mermaid’s remaining 567 stalls as shared parking in order to meet the retail center’s 174 parking stall requirement. The parking demands for this entire site, including the new development, will vary throughout each day. All of the uses on the site will not have their peak parking demands at the same time or even on the same day of the week. The Mermaid is currently 48 parking stalls short of what was required in 2000, and also has been able to lease unused daytime spaces for Park & Ride parking, and yet the owners state that the parking lot has still never been filled to anywhere near capacity.