From:
To: City Council
Subject: Parklet Design Guidelines
Date: Sunday, April 02, 2023 10:55:03 AM
Dear Council Members,
I am writing to ask you to reject the proposed Parklet Design Guidelines. I have been a member of the Design Guidelines Subcommittee that has been tasked with reviewing the guidelines as developed by GHD. I am not impressed with the result. The guidelines you have before you were largely taken from guidelines drafted by the cities of Healdsburg and Sonoma. Both cities have only been involved with parklets since the pandemic. I know that in Sonoma they have had a particularly tough go of it and they have not been universally embraced. So the guidelines that have come up with are overly restrictive and lacking in creativity. I don’t think this is the approach we want to emulate in Sebastopol.
As a member of The Core Project, I have been involved with trying to bring parklets to the city for years. We were able to get the city council to approve a process for permitting parklets in 2015. The council approved Resolution 6033 Establishing Parklets Guidelines and Procedures on April 21, 2015, almost exactly 8 years ago. Step number 1 indicated that plans should be prepared in ‘accordance with the Guidelines established by the City of San Francisco’. I encourage us to take this approach.
Parklets originated in San Francisco and San Francisco has been on the vanguard of this innovative way to balance the public use of the public right-of-way. As part of The Core Project’s roll-out of the parklet idea in Sebastopol we had invited the San Francisco planner responsible for developing the parklet guidelines, Robin Abad Ocubillo, who gave a presentation and provided encouragement.
Robin is now the Director of Shared Spaces for San Francisco. They have a new set of guidelines just published and they are excellent!
As we’ve been discussing making parklets permanent in Sebastopol, I have repeatedly referred to San Francisco’s guidelines, and suggested we not ‘reinvent the wheel.’ During our design guidelines subcommittee meetings, I would refer to these guidelines as a best practice example of how to plan for inspirational, safe and fun parklets to improve the environment downtown. I still believe this is the best path forward. Below is a link to these guidelines. I urge you to reject the proposed guidelines in your packet and go back to the original parklet resolution and adapt the San Francisco Shared Spaces Manual as the design guidelines to be used for our parklets. This is an excellent, exciting and inspirational document that I believe will result in parklets that are much better designed and better contributors to our public realm.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jhtkv8m8ge7o21c/SF%20Shared%20Spaces%20Manual.pdf?dl=0 I urge you to listen to the advice of your design guidelines subcommittee and reject the proposed guidelines before you and adopt the San Francisco Shared Spaces Manual guidelines. I strongly believe this will result in better parklets for Sebastopol.
Regards,
Paul Fritz
P.O. Box 1074