The above renderings were taken from the 2020 Comprehensive Land Use Plan, and repurposed earlier this year in the context of Short Street's temporary closure to traffic.
Village Council presses pause on new downtown parking plans
- Published: May 21, 2026
Questions about downtown parking — Does the village have enough? Does it need more? — were once again before Council at the group’s May 4 regular meeting.
The discussion was Council’s first pass on fulfilling one of its two-year goals established earlier this year — simply to “revisit existing parking plans,” with the ideal outcome being the formalization of a parking needs evaluation and, if necessary, developing “a plan of action” for new parking.
The existing parking plans come from renderings crafted around 2018 that show where the Village could site more than 150 new parking spaces around the downtown business corridor.
Potential locations and an approximate number of new spaces include:
• 35 mostly diagonal spaces on South Walnut Street, at the front entrance of Mills Lawn Elementary;
• 71 diagonal spaces around the intersection of Elm and Phillips streets, in front of St. Paul Catholic Church and the old tennis courts;
• Eight diagonal spots along Corry Street, jutting into Beatty-Hughes Park; and
• 39 additional spots along Corry Street, parallel to the bike path.
Variations of those plans were briefly mentioned in the Village’s 2020 Comprehensive Land Use Plan, or CLUP, as recommendations the Village could “explore.” However, the heft of those recommendations were cut by former Village Manager Josué Salmerón before Council voted to adopt the CLUP.
Taken from the 2020 Comprehensive Land Use Plan.
At Council’s May 4 meeting, sitting Village Manager Johnnie Burns told Council that he’s inclined to revisit those earlier plans, just at a later date.
“There’s always this talk of needing more parking downtown,” Burns said. “But for me, right now, it’s just not in the budget. We don’t have the money to add any more parking or do any kind of reconfiguring.”
All told, establishing those 153 new parking spaces would cost an estimated $395,000, according to Village documents.
Burns recommended to Council — should the group wish to pursue creating more parking — that the group include a parking line item in the Village’s 2027 budget and, perhaps, consider which of the projects should be prioritized.
For him, it’s the added parking on Walnut Street that takes precedence.
“It would be the most expensive, but it would also be the most beneficial,” he said, noting that, in addition to creating more parking there, he would also want to move some of the road’s electrical and fiber optic lines underground.
Taken from the 2020 Comprehensive Land Use Plan.
Another benefit to waiting on that particular project, Burns said, is allowing the Yellow Springs School District more time to finish the ongoing facilities improvement project at Mills Lawn, the completion of which will inevitably lead to traffic pattern changes around the school before the end of this calendar year.
Should the Village tackle the parking initiatives incrementally, Burns recommended starting with angled spaces along Phillips and Elm streets, which he said would be the cheapest and most attainable projects.
“To do all of them in 2027 would be aggressive,” Burns said. “We thought they were necessary in 2018, but others felt they didn’t need to be in [the CLUP], so we put them on the backburner. So, yes, this is an on-again, off-again topic. When we try to do anything one way or the other, parking is always thrown into the mix as a wildcard to make it all fall apart. It was a huge part of the Short Street discussion.”
Taken from the 2020 Comprehensive Land Use Plan.
Burns was referring to the months-long, villagewide discourse around the Village’s experimental project of turning Short Street into a pedestrian-only space. Many of the most vocal opponents of the project cited a perceived deficit of downtown parking as their primary concern.
“That was the only time since 2018 we’ve taken spots away,” Burns maintained.
Since 2018, the Village has created 75 additional spots in the Village-owned gravel lot along Railroad Street, 26 at the Bryan Center and 30 in a gravel lot at the intersection of U.S. 68 and Cemetery Street. Because of those new spots, Burns suggested the issue of parking has lessened over the years.
“I don’t hear about it as much as you’d think,” he said. “It’s not as prominent as everybody might think it is.”
Chamber of Commerce Director Phillip O’Rourke had a slightly different perspective.
“I don’t think we hear a lot about it because it’s a given,” O’Rouke said. “People don’t have outrage until it seems like we’re going to lose parking. The issue hasn’t been resolved — that’s a given — but when something comes in and interferes with what we already do have, then it’s an issue. It’s a rolling concern.”
Around that point in the conversation, the focus briefly turned to creating more accessible parking out of the existing downtown spaces.
“I’d like to see way more handicapped and accessible parking, and let’s not wait until the end of the year,” Council member Senay Semere said. “The more I heard about it during the Short Street discussion, and how disruptive it is for that community, it really changed my outlook.”
Burns indicated the best step forward in that direction was contracting Choice One Engineering — the Village’s go-to civil engineering firm — to survey Yellow Springs’ downtown accessible parking needs. Such a survey would cost about $1,000.
This year’s earlier discourse around Short Street excluded, Monday’s Council meeting was the most substantive parking discussion in Council Chambers since 2021. That fall, Planning Commission drafted and unanimously approved a list of recommendations for Council’s consideration:
• No further parking studies be undertaken by the Village;
• Parallel parking — but not angled parking — improvements be explored on Phillips and Elm streets;
• No parking fees be instituted by the Village for the downtown area;
• Council address outdated limited-hour parking signage around the downtown;
• Explore wayfinding technology and signage directing people to parking options; and
• Village staff provide estimated budgets for each of the parking options mentioned in the parking plan.
It’s unclear if Council ever received those recommendations; few of them have been actualized.
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