LA GRANDE — The city of La Grande soon will be issuing parking tickets again in the downtown area.

The city has not enforced downtown parking regulations since late March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The city resumes enforcing downtown parking rules beginning Monday, March 22.

The change comes after the state downgraded Union County’s COVID-19 risk category from extreme to moderate, allowing more businesses to serve more customers, particularly restaurants and bars, which now can operate at 50% capacity for dine-in service. That means more people are visiting downtown, where finding a parking spot can be difficult.

“With most of our retail and restaurants now open to the public, it is time to assist our downtown businesses to make sure that customers have access to their stores,” said City Manager Robert Strope in a press release.

The La Grande Police Department’s code enforcement officer will issue warnings for first-time parking violations from March 22 until April 5, when tickets with fines kick in.

The city stopped enforcing downtown parking rules a year ago, after Gov. Kate Brown issued a stay-at-home order and closed stores to the public except those providing services and products deemed essential. The governor also ordered businesses to allow people to work remotely as much as possible. La Grande Police Chief Gary Bell said the city ceased the enforcement in part to help people living downtown who needed parking places.

“We wanted to lessen their hardship,” Bell said.

The money the city collects from fines for parking violations helps pay the code enforcement officer’s salary. Bell said, though, that revenue covers only a portion of the position’s cost.

“Our code enforcement officer does many other things,” Bell said. “We are not reliant on parking fines to sustain the position.”

The officer’s other responsibilities include enforcing nuisance ordinances, including those involving weed abatement and abandoned vehicles. La Grande police officers once dealt with such issues, but in recent years the department shifted the responsibility to the code enforcement officer. Bell said that was in response to a significant increase in reports of code violations.

“We wanted to unburden them from these tasks so they will have more time to respond to calls,” Bell said.

Larry Fry, the owner of 1104 Adams Antiques, supports the move to bring back parking fines because it will reduce how far people have to walk to get to a store. He noted many stores downtown rely on people traveling through town for business. Fry said these people are not willing to walk very far to get to a business.

“They will walk one block but not two or three blocks,” he said.

Fry also said the parking fines add a sense of order to downtown La Grande.

“You can’t have chaos,” Fry said. “Regulations are put in place for a reason and that is to prevent chaos.”

Keisha Anderson, a real estate agent with John J. Howard and Associates Real Estate, 1207 Adams Ave., is not a fan of the fines coming back because it means she and other people who work downtown again will have to move their vehicles regularly out of two-hour zones because there is not enough free parking downtown.

“Many of us will be left shuffling our cars every two hours,” Anderson said.

John Howard, the owner of John J. Howard and Associates, said the city could take several steps to improve the parking space situation. He said the city should encourage Union Pacific Railroad employees to park in spaces and lots on their corporation’s property instead of the space the city has for 24-hour parking adjacent to railroad property, which he said many railroad employees use. This would open up many parking spaces for people coming downtown.

Howard also said he would like to have the city offer discounts to get people to buy permits for downtown parking.