Picture a narrow redwood deck placed in the street in front of a restaurant in the area normally reserved for customer parking, allowing those businesses to provide outside seating without impeding pedestrian traffic on Pendleton’s narrow Main Street sidewalks.

The idea of these parklets has been floated before with not much success. To fund the project, the Pendleton Downtown Association has approached the Pendleton Development Commission (PDC), the financing arm of the city with the ability to borrow huge amounts of cash. Evidently, they now feel that the time is right for another attempt.

So, what’s changed? The amount of available parking is already shrinking. The sale and redevelopment of the former Goodwill Industries building has rendered that large parking lot unusable for casual shoppers and downtown employees and business owners, while the demand increases as more apartments become available in the Bowman and Odd Fellows buildings.

The intentions of Sisters Cafe’s owners to develop their second story as a boutique hotel and apartments in the Old City Hall will only add to the pressure for more parking. Since enforcement of the two-hour parking ordinance in the downtown area has been eliminated, many of those spaces are now occupied, not by shoppers, but by downtown residents living in apartment buildings that have no off-street parking, further exacerbating the problem.

“Walla Walla has them,” a fact frequently stated by the PDC director. I was there (on a recent) Tuesday at 10 a.m. Not a single parking place open on Main Street downtown, nor was there a single patron on any of the several parklets. The difference? Pendleton lacks that bustling retail atmosphere so prevalent in downtown Walla Walla, Washington.

Will the use of property taxes for this project boost the tax base and afford a return for all property owners in the Urban Renewal District that will be required to repay the loans needed to fund the grants given these restaurants? Not hardly. It benefits only a small number of restaurants, while other struggling retailers are left to fend for themselves.

When the city council agreed to subsidize the Pendleton Downtown Association, it wasn’t without conditions. The association was required to produce a detailed parking plan based on a robust retail atmosphere and development of the empty second stories, some in the same businesses now requesting the parklets. That parking plan has yet to be seen. It’s no wonder that recently the association has had two directors throw in the towel and leave unexpectedly.

Perhaps it’s time to consider a different approach, one that’s permanent. Grants to fund recessed first-floor storefronts would give those restaurants the desired outdoor seating without encroaching on pedestrians, increase property values for the building owners and raise the tax base, which in turn would benefit all city residents through increased revenue for maintaining city facilities.

Rick Rohde

Pendleton