The Ballston study looked at the ratio of parking spaces to office space, and from that the Arlington County Planning Division concluded that the number of parking-to-office spaces in Clarendon was sufficient.
However, the Ballston study does not include evening and weekend parking and was conducted before the opening of the new Trader Joe’s at 1109 N. Highland St., CCCA President Ken Fulton wrote in a letter addressed to planning commission members last week.
The CCCA is worried that visitors to the Clarendon neighborhood who use the Penzance projects’s proposed garage at 3001 Washington Blvd. will not have enough space to park during off business hours.
According to Planning Division spokesperson Aaron Shriber, the study was an internal survey done by the transportation division and had no relation with the construction project.
Planning used the survey to draw conclusions after the CCCA began to raise concerns over parking availability in Clarendon.
The planning commission acknowledged the CCCA’s complaint at the Jan. 9 meeting and with differing degrees of harshness scolded county staff.
“Clarendon is a major entertainment area and only studying daytime parking numbers is, I think, totally inadequate,” said planning commission member Charles Monfort. “I am pretty much adding Clarendon to my list of no drive areas in Arlington.”
“I don’t know what our parking needs are in Clarendon because I don’t think we have asked the right questions,” said planning commission member Steve Cole.
The transportation study was also withheld from the public until the site plan’s transportation commission meeting in early January, despite constant requests to see the study beforehand, according to Fulton.
The January transportation commission meeting would have been the first opportunity for staff to publicly disclose the study since the November SPRC meeting came early in the month, and the study was not finished until around Thanksgiving, after the second of two transportation commission meetings that month.
The analysis of the data took more time to look over, Shriber said. December had no SPRC or transportation meetings.
Officials in CCCA would have liked to have been in the loop, they said.
“The [parking] analysis was not meant for public comment,” said Shriber.
The site plan for this project at the corner of N. Washington Blvd. and N. Garfield Street will be presented to the county board on Jan. 24. The project includes 300,000 square feet of office space in two conjoined buildings. The county board approve it for construction or defer it for further review.
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