Roughly two years ago, St. Paul parking engineer Elizabeth Stiffler had a grand ambition: take the city’s residential parking-permit system, with its dozens of districts and multitude of rules, and simplify it.

“Am I going to rip the Band-Aid off?” she said with gung-ho pluck in a 2016 interview. “I think we can go from 35 (districts) to 10 … It’s possible we might go out to the community and they say, ‘We don’t need it.’ I don’t like to be big government, come in and do something without community input.”

After a $47,000 study and yes, many rounds of community input, Stiffler — who works for the city’s Public Works department — now has her plan. And she admits it’s not nearly as far-reaching as she once envisioned.

“I can’t tell you how many residents have been there 38 years and remember putting the changes in,” Stiffler said this week.

In fact, after 780 responses to a 2016 city-sponsored survey, she was shocked to discover, “almost everyone in a (parking) area felt their area was needed,” and more enforcement would help.

The districts were created when groups of neighbors signed petitions for parking permit rules to cover their blocks. The rules were the same as they are today: Three-quarters of an area’s residents are required to sign on, saying they want their own individual district, and they’ll typically get one.

The first place in the city to get a residential permit system was the area around O’Gara’s Bar and Grill in the early 1980s. Since then, St. Paul added a lot and lost a few, and now has 27 separate districts.

After hearing from many in those districts, Stiffler concluded that some residents had unrealistic expectations as to what a permit system can actually solve. Areas that are just getting more dense, for example.

“Permit parking is not set up to address density,” she said. “And density is going up everywhere.”

But Stiffler did make some changes.

Of the 27 districts, the biggest mish-mash centers around the University of St. Thomas. A full 10 of the city’s districts are in the neighborhoods surrounding the private school.

Under the city’s proposed plan, those 10 would consolidate to seven, covering the same geographic area. The overwhelming majority would have a uniform rule: no parking without a permit, Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Again, largely the way it was before.

Yes, there will still be a few streets with exceptions: several blocks close to campus, for example, where there’s no parking at all without a permit.

But outside the university area, very few changes — and no other district consolidations — were made. Thus, the 27 districts would be consolidated to 24.

The biggest change, citywide, deals with how many — and what type — of those permits residents are allowed.

Currently some districts allow five, some six permits per household; one small district, just south of Interstate 94 near Snelling Avenue, even allows for unlimited permits per household.

“Very few people actually get the limit,” Stiffler noted.

The plan is to allow all households citywide — no matter what district — five permits each. That would include three vehicle permits (semi-permanent stickers that attach to the inside of windows) and two non-adhesive visitor placards, for guests.

That city-wide change will allow public works to more easily maintain a database allowing online renewals, Stiffler said. That’s something city officials are looking at.

The plan has received push-back in some areas.

“It did not go over well,” said John McCauley, a resident of Irvine Park who attended a neighborhood meeting where Stiffler spoke. While McCauley noted he and others had no issue with the change, some neighbors that had renters or larger homes were “quite vocal.” Irvine Park currently allows for six permits of any type per houshold. Related Articles St. Paul district reports enrollment drop as pandemic moves school online

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As far as enforcement — which is done by police, not public works — Stiffler said she believed in many cases, “There doesn’t have to be a lot of enforcement. A lot of people will honor the system, and there’s enough relief that most residents won’t notice.”

The parking plan will go before the St. Paul Panning Commission’s transportation committee on April 23.