Arena Parking Woes Are City’s Problem : * It’s Up to Anaheim, Not County, to Remedy Situation

That the new Anaheim Arena is there at all is something of a minor miracle, given the initial gamble for the host city and the now-forgotten race with Santa Ana to be first city with an indoor facility.

The parking problems that have bedeviled the arena reflect some of that haste. Parking is basic to all planning approval, and it’s hard to imagine the city ever would have allowed a project it was not involved in to go forward without adequate attention to cars. But here the city is, after going for it, with a building, a hockey team, and not enough places to park.

It wasn’t so long ago that it would have been hard to imagine duck whistles and grown men on skates with shirts bearing a likeness somewhere between Donald Duck and Jason of the horror films. When you hear early concert-goers complain that they can’t roll out a full-scale tailgate party at the arena, it helps to remember that serious observers were wondering not long ago whether there would be any events at the new building at all.

Still, the parking problems remain. This is clear when management advises patrons to show up early, and then cracks down on them for setting out picnics in the parking lot before the doors open. It’s hard to imagine the early birds being satisfied for long with their brown-bag sandwiches, or with the advice of arena management to look at the artwork outside the building, or tour the inside of the marble-laden arena.

So a better traffic-flow plan is needed, or a lot more parking to accommodate later arrivals.

Well, this is a regional problem, isn’t it? Not really. This is the city’s project.

The county can help, but it should not be in the position of being the white knight to bail the city of Anaheim out of its lack of foresight. And Supervisor William G. Steiner, whose district includes Anaheim, had a well-intentioned proposal recently to build a multilevel parking lot on county-owned land surrounding the arena.

The city of Anaheim is now leasing the land from the county. If a parking structure gets built, the hard-pressed county shouldn’t be the risk-taker to put up the money for this city project. Let the city or a private contractor do it. With construction estimates for such a project running at between $8,000 to $10,000 per space, the county is ill-equipped financially to be the bailout agency for the project.

The good news is that people are showing up at events. The bad news is that the building was rushed on line without adequate consideration to parking.

It’s good, however, that the Environmental Management Agency is at least studying options other than building a parking structure, such as selling some county-owned lots to the city. And there is a temporary plan to work on ways for providing better traffic flow, such as shuttling workers from Anaheim Stadium lots, removing construction trailers and providing more cashiers for speedier entry.