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City of Mounds View Staff Report Item No: 07A Meeting Date: May 7, 2025 Type of Business: Planning Business To: Mounds View Planning Commission From: Phil Carlson, AICP, Stantec, City Planner Item Title/Subject: Parking Regulations Request: Possible Zoning Code Amendments Introduction: The City Council has asked that the Planning Commission review the parking regulations in the Zoning Code for commercial uses. The issue is that the required ratios for parking may be too high, resulting in too much pavement being required for businesses, both an economic and an environmental problem. This is a discussion item at this point for the Planning Commission. Analysis I reviewed Mounds View’s parking regulations for the number of spaces required for various commercial uses (not all uses) and compared them to a number of nearby communities, plus Burnsville, which did a major parking study recently. Mounds View’s standards are mostly within the range of other communities, but some are higher. The trend in recent decades is to reduce the required parking for many office and retail uses, which reflects the concern that the Council has. In the 1960s many cities used a typical standard of 5.5 spaces per 1,000 square feet of floor area for retail uses and 5 spaces per 1,000 for office uses. These standards made their way into zoning ordinances in almost every city in the country. In the decades since, many cities have reviewed their experience and done their own studies and reduced these numbers, often also including a maximum parking standard. This is the case in Burnsville where there are minimum and maximum numbers for some uses. The question of parking demand is unfortunately complicated, and one number never fits every use and business exactly. If the parking standard is too high, we impose a financial burden on businesses and on stormwater management issues. Plus, a “sea of asphalt” is not attractive. If the parking standard is too low, we run the risk of parking and traffic safety problems on site or of parking spilling onto city streets or nearby properties. Getting the “right” number is not easy, but we can recommend reasonable numbers that should fit most situations. The attached table lists the current Mounds View parking standards and the standards from other cities we reviewed. For ease of use, the Mounds View standards and many of the others are condensed or simplified from the full text in the ordinance. In most cases, the comparisons are “apples-to-apples” but for some uses, for example restaurants, there are standards based on seating, on floor area, and on employes, and sometimes all three.