MOORPARK : Hunter Pushes Move to Angled Parking

Moorpark City Councilman Pat Hunter said he plans to ask his colleagues to consider allowing angled parking along High Street in an effort to create more parking spaces and improve the ambience of the historic strip.

Hunter, who took office about a year ago and serves on the council’s transportation and streets subcommittee, said angled parking would also make downtown Moorpark more aesthetically pleasing and increase patronage of High Street shops.

“The easier you make it for people to access shops, the more likely they are to use them,” Hunter said last week. “I think it’s in keeping with what we’re trying to do with High Street, which is to return it to years gone past.”

Joy Cummings, president of the Moorpark Old Town Merchants Assn., said her group supports the idea.

“It’s something we asked for for two years ago and we were adamantly turned down,” Cummings said. “We were told that there was no way we would ever have head-in parking on High Street because the police thought there would be too many accidents.”

While other council members say they are willing to revisit the issue, Hunter’s proposal still faces an uphill battle.

“We probably looked at that somewhere between a year and two years ago and for a number of reasons decided to not permit it there,” Mayor Paul Lawrason said.

One of the concerns with the plan was safety, Lawrason said, because traffic moves down the street unimpeded from Spring Road to Moorpark Avenue at 35 m.p.h.

“I’m willing to look at it again,” Lawrason said.