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emergency and drove around the building four times and finally called and said, ‘I’m in your back parking lot. I’ve got a cat that’s really sick, and I can’t find a parking spot,’ so we just brought her in the back.”

Not only does the front parking lot fill up during dining hours; sometimes the back parking lot gets full, too, Knowles says, and when Chip’s moves in, that will increase tra c in the back even more.

“The tra c kind of comes and goes. Sometimes they’re busy, sometimes they’re not,” Knowles says, “but as a business, it does make us nervous about the possibility of even more long-term parking.”

Nearby neighbors insist the parking lots are overextended, but according to City

Planning, Stonelake is perfectly within its legal rights. Granted, the process that got it there couldn’t be more complicated, says Frances Estes, a senior development coordinator with the City of Dallas.

“If someone came to us today with this parking layout, we wouldn’t let them build this,” Estes says.

So how does Stonelake get away with it? It utilizes three primary tactics: delta credits, shared parking spaces and remote parking.

The most complicated of the three is delta credits. When the Skillman Live Oak shopping center was built in the 1940s, there were no parking requirements. Years later, when the city began enforcing parking requirements, it employed a system in which certain businesses had to prove they could provide more parking than others. For example, restaurants require more

SECTION to advertise call 214.560.4203 parking than retail, which require more parking than o ces.

To protect businesses in older shopping centers such as Skillman Live Oak, the city granted delta credits, which are essentially imaginary parking spaces, to fill the gap between the physical parking spaces and the parking requirement. Those delta credits have carried on through the decades — although some credits have been lost during business changes, and once delta credits are lost they can never be recovered.

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Stonelake also uses shared parking options, which means if one business closes at 5 or 6 p.m. and another reaches peak parking after 6 p.m., then they can share parking spaces. Whether or not this system actually works out for the businesses in reality is up for debate, but as far as the city is concerned, it’s code-compliant.

Finally, Stonelake uses a remote parking lot for the triangle where Wine Therapist and the Mecca are housed — a parking lot o Live Oak provides 22 spaces. It’s important to note that City Planning doesn’t count parking spaces that back up into the street in their parking count, so dozens of the spaces people use regularly are not included in the required parking count.

But the real question is, can Stonelake bring in more restaurants? That’s what neighbors such as Talley want to know.

According to the current parking arrangement, Stonelake is maxed out, Estes says. The buildings on the east side of Skillman have exactly as many parking spaces as the city requires for such a tenant mix.

Parking-wise, the EDDC space is listed as a child care facility, which requires very little parking, and the Wine Therapist as a liquor store, which also requires very little parking. So in order to put in a restaurant in either location, Estes says, Stonelake would have to prove they can provide additional parking for higher tra c businesses.

However, it wouldn’t be impossible.

“They would have to go through the appropriate measures,” Estes says, “but we don’t know; they could. There’s so many ways that businesses can meet code requirements. If they make it work and it’s compliant with code, we’re required to issue them a permit. We can’t go, ‘Well, the neighbors don’t like you.’ ”

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