Snohomish weighing whether to widen First Street’s sidewalks, alter parking

SNOHOMISH — Prominent changes to First Street, displayed last week as concepts being evaluated, could see narrower road lanes to accommodate wider sidewalks and may see angled parking switched for parallel parking. These options are meant to make the street safer for crossing pedestrians and more attractive streetside.

As the corridor is one of the city’s crown jewels, City Hall is taking as much feedback it can get.

“We want to maintain that ‘feel’ that people love so much, while having what matters to our future generations,” Mayor Linda Redmon told the audience at a First Street meeting last week.

Leaders, though, say they’ve made no preset conclusions on how it will look.

The core work is to improve the street layout and the infrastructure underneath.

Under First Street, there’s a 131-year-old clay sewer line, and cast-iron water pipes that are between 35 to 90 years old. In 2021, the city’s former city administrator and utilities general manager Steve Schuller said these are well overdue for replacement.

Upgrading the water and sewer is a driving force why the plan is being made, city public works director Nova Heaton said. When tearing up the road to fix the pipes, the city wants to pair that work with replacing the road and sidewalk.

Implementing any plan will take years, and the city would seek government grant money.

First for First, though, Snohomish needs to identify how things would look.

The Portland-based design firm First Forty Feet is developing designs for First Street’s future layout. A construction plan will be developed later.

An overarching goal, principal designer Jason Graf said, is to “make it more of a ‘people’ place.”

This includes pedestrian walkability and creating gathering spaces, as well as connecting the city’s riverfront parks to First Street. It could mean ways to bring in sidewalk benches and sidewalk cafes.

Parking, though, was the prime topic for business owners attending the 4 o’clock meeting Thursday in the Carnegie Building.

Kim Hamilton, the owner of Ranee-Paul Antiques on the east end of First Street, called on designers to do nothing that loses parking spaces. “I lose customers constantly because people can’t find parking,” he said at the meeting.

First in, first out

Graf’s design ideas reduce how First Street is heavily car-focused. They incorporate more pedestrian crossings. 

From Avenue D to Union, about two-thirds of First Street from building edge to building edge is built for cars, a project document outlines.

Parallel parking would eliminate cars backing into traffic, and possibly cyclists.

Competing interests for the sidewalk are on designer’s minds. They’re looking at how poles, signs, benches and more affect usability.

Snohomish’s current sidewalks are 12 feet wide.

Graf said parallel parking would gain seven to eight feet of sidewalk width. It will result in 30% to 40% less parking spaces, he said.

“I think we can do a lot of small solutions on parking,” such as using wayfinding signs to encourage people to park west of Avenue D, Heaton said at the meeting. 

The city also has thought of designating more ADA spaces.

Downtown has adequate parking on most days, but there’s a need to strategize on it, Maygen Hetherington, the Executive Director of the Historic Downtown Snohomish Association, said in an interview.

Hetherington said the parking available west of Avenue D is already available. Improvements west of Avenue D can make this area more inviting.

Adding more viewing areas or hardened seating at the parks would also enhance downtown. An idea for steeples at one of the parks could give people more places to take a lunch.

Last year, students at a University of Washington urban design class created concepts that resulted in using parallel parking and bike lanes as a solution to increase cyclist safety, and closing off the ending stub of Avenue A at the gazebo to create a gathering space.

First Forty Feet’s guidance from the city’s call for bidders last fall is to use the UW concepts as a “foundational starting point,” the call read.

“We are a destination, and it is a fantastic destination,” attendee Aaron Vicklund, who co-owns two First Street stores, said post-meeting.

He doesn’t want to see parking taken away.

“This town is built on foot traffic,” Vicklund said.

More than half the visitors who come to downtown are from outside Snohomish, Hetherington said from HDSA data. HDSA’s data found an average visitor stays for nearly two hours**.

First chance to get involved

The city held three well-attended public events March 27 in the upper room of the Carnegie Building.

The morning session was standing room only, city spokeswoman Shari Ireton said. The afternoon sessions collectively had more than 150 people attend.

The city will be out at the farmers market this spring and summer to answer questions, Ireton said.

Also, the team is planning to develop the plan further and hold a demonstration project for the public. The demonstration is currently planned for late June, Ireton said.

A large part of the meetings were to poll the public with a survey on First Street’s needs and to answer questions.

Other topics include whether to retain a historic feel for First Street, or to add a more  modern feel, as well as whether to have more trees. 

This survey, at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/XHSCL3X , is expected to be available through to next week, said Graf.

Hetherington, from HDSA, wants to hear what the public says for the final result.

“We share the same concerns that we don’t want to lose any parking,” but would like to learn from other towns that reshaped their downtowns and implement what changes that worked in those towns, Hetherington said.

Other cities have modified sections of their downtown parking before with the same goals Snohomish is pursuing. 

Chelan, Carnation and Port Townsend are some towns that redid their downtowns in the past, Hetherington said.

In 2015, Monroe exchanged angled parking for parallel parking and wider sidewalks at the nexus of its downtown around Main and Lewis streets. It altered just one side of Main Street downtown while keeping the opposite side angle parking. This came as a compromise set by Monroe’s City Council after hearing outcry against a proposal of changing both sides to parallel parking.

Graf, the consultant, also offered parking time limits as an idea to increase parking turnover. In surveys taken at the 4 p.m. meeting, introducing time limits ranked lowest as a solution.

Graf said another idea is to add more angled parking on the alphabet avenues, and to see if the handful of private parking lot owners in downtown could spare a few spaces for public use. Most of those private lots either use paid permits or restrict parking to visitors to their immediate businesses. There are no pay-by-hour parking lots that relax street parking.

People also pressed Graf and Heaton to say if the parallel parking spaces would fit large trucks. Mainstream full-size pickups straddle just above and below 20 feet in length depending on the model. They’re a touch longer than the fullsize cars of the 1970s.

In any parking layout scenario, the size of the spaces would determine how many spaces will fit within a city block – sort of like how legroom space decides how many airliner seats fit in a commercial jet.

First step of many

Heaton said the city would finish the First Street master plan and then refine its master plan for Second Street to make sure the two are functionally complementary, Heaton said.

Implementing any First Street plan would take years and be broken into phases, Heaton said.

“The city will try to leverage state and federal dollars using (its) utility funds as match for the projects,” Heaton said by email. “This means we would wait to secure funding for the whole project phase before we did the utility work, if feasible.”

Take the survey

A link to the survey is at www.snohomishwa.gov/858/First-Street-Master-Plan

For the direct link, go to  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/XHSCL3X

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**- CORRECTION - HDSA told the Tribune that the average visitor spends 114 minutes in Snohomish. A Tribune reporter translated this number of minutes as 2.5 hours. 114 minutes is slightly less than two hours. The Tribune regrets the error.