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A Data-Based Parking System
THE INTERNATIONAL PARKING INSTITUTE
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Communications and Image
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A Sustainable Garage Renovation
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Planning for HighDemand Events
SEPTEMBER 2017
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Managing a City Sacramento City Manager Howard Chan finds out a background in parking makes all the difference.
CITY
MANAGING A C
ity life is booming. Resident numbers and business numbers are up, sports teams are thriving, and new arenas are opening, which means more people coming and going, more demand on the transportation system, and more demand for services. All of that, of course, means the city needs a manager who can juggle, sometimes so fast it’s a blur; stay crazy-organized; and negotiate like a master and who can do it while getting along with everybody else. So what’s a city to do when things are like that and it needs a new manager? It turns to a parking guy.
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INTERNATIONAL PARKING INSTITUTE | SEPTEMBER 2017
Howard Chan is named city manager in Sacramento and says his background in parking has made all the difference. By Kim Fernandez
parking.org/tpp
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You might already know him, but just in case, meet Howard Chan, who took a job valet parking cars in college and ended up being recruited for the job of parking services manager in Sacramento, Calif., where he is now city manager. True story. Ask him about it, though, and he laughs, clearly not entirely comfortable with the notoriety that comes with the job. He also talks a lot about the people he’s worked with along the way, from frontline workers all the way up to finance executives, all of whom get the same tone of respect and all of whom, it seems, have taught lessons to a high-profile guy who hasn’t lost his humility along the way. So how did a parking guy rise to the top of the heap in a thriving city? Chan laughs and says, “It’s quite a story.”
Humble Beginnings Chan was making his way through California State University in 1989 when a friend told him to check out a valet parking job nearby. Telling the story now, he pauses. “There was no part growing up when I said I wanted to be a city manager. Or go into parking,” he says. “This notion of getting into parking and government and city management still feels surreal.” Chan checked out the job and became a valet parking attendant working for The Parking Place. It was, he says, “one of the best jobs I ever had.” The pay was good, tips were fantastic, and he became friends with all sorts of people at the brand-spanking new Marriott where he was assigned. Graduation loomed, and Chan’s friends started taking internships in tech. He’d occasionally gaze in that direction and then he’d be given more responsibility and the money would get better and really, he was happy. He was promoted to facility manager, district manager, operations manager, and finally, senior operations manager with Standard Parking, where he stayed until he was recruited by Sacramento. And then, a friend called. “He was in Sacramento and looking to do something different,” says Chan. “He worked for me for about 10 years and hadn’t been in the public sector before and wanted to know if he could use me as a reference.” Of course, Chan said yes and when the recruiter called, gave his friend a glowing recommendation and then forgot about it. Well, he forgot about it until the recruiter called back and started asking very different questions. “The woman calls me back and says they’re launching a national search for this position and it seems like I have a lot of experience and asks if I’m interested. I have to say, it was odd and my knee-jerk reaction was to say no and tell her to finish the job search for the position my friend wanted and then maybe call me another time. But then I picked up the phone and called my friend and told him that he wouldn’t believe what happened.” His friend, in the true spirit of friendship, told Chan he should at least give the job some thought and invited
him and his wife to Sacramento to check out the city. Which they did. The friends had a great time reconnecting and seeing the city, and then they wandered into a model home. “This was 2002,” Chan says. “We walk into this house, and it was gorgeous, and I said, ‘Holy smokes, I’m coming from San Francisco—you can get all of this house for that price?’ So that piqued my interest.” There was something else at play, too. Chan’s father, a Chinese immigrant who worked as a bartender for years to support his three boys (Chan’s mother worked equally hard cleaning hotel rooms), was terminally ill. And his dad told Chan that if the job was an opportunity, he should take it without another thought. “So,” Chan says, “one thing led to another, and I became parking services manager for the city of Sacramento. And it was very, very different. “The flexibility you have in the private sector doesn’t exist in the public sector,” he explains. “I didn’t appreciate what that would look like. In the private sector, you make a decision, you launch, and it’s good. On the public side, there’s a whole series of things you need to do—get the community on board, get the city council on board, do outreach to businesses and communities and neighborhoods and unions. I didn’t fully appreciate all of that. It takes awhile to understand how it works and the reasons we have to go through all of that, and it was incredibly frustrating the first few months.” He asked his wife what she thought and then one more time turned to his dad. “He gave me more sage advice,” Chan remembers. “He told me, in Cantonese, ‘You’ve got to focus on what you can control and let go of the other things. You’re not going to be able to control it or change it, and you’ll drive yourself crazy.’” The son listened, took the words to heart, and quickly settled in to his new job, which, he says now, “was great.”
Learning Curve There was a definite learning curve when Chan arrived in Sacramento—public financing, getting input from stakeholders, and creating partnerships, to name a few new areas—but it wasn’t long before his job managing off-street parking was merged with another division and he found himself in charge of on-street parking as well. “I got a crash course,” he says, learning about enforcement, turnover, liens, public hearings, and disabled parking. He settled in for nearly 10 years, and then the game changed: The city began working toward building a new arena for the Sacramento Kings basketball franchise, and a big piece of the puzzle was parking monetization. Initially, a private company proposed paying the city $400 million for its entire arena parking operation. Local unions didn’t like the plan, and the city didn’t relish the idea of giving up control over the parking asset. Three years of due diligence followed, considering different financing models and demands. In the end, the city parking.org/tpp
maintained ownership of a majority of the parking assets but turned over control of several parking garages to the Kings ownership group. And Chan’s career trajectory changed dramatically. “During the course of my 10 years in parking, I was very tied to the community,” he says. “In parking, you deal with everyone out there. That gave me a lot of exposure to the community businesses, our elected officials, and to other departments.” He notes that’s not true of all government jobs. “Typically, if you worked in code enforcement let’s say, your exposure is limited to property owners and folks who are internal to the city. But parking lends itself to crossing departmental lines and gave me the opportunity to establish meaningful relationships throughout the city, both internal and external.” During his next performance review, Chan’s supervisor told him he’d done such a great job, there was really nowhere else to go. Shortly after that, the assistant city manager job became open, and the city’s director of public works encouraged Chan to apply. They’d done a few rounds of interviews, he said, and didn’t really like the candidates so far, but Chan’s reputation as a hard worker and collaborative community member had gone all the way up to the city manager’s office. “I told him I wanted everyone’s eyes to be wide open—I didn’t have the background you’d typically have to be assistant city manager,” Chan says. “I also said I had to talk with my wife and make sure this was right for our family because it’s all a team effort with us.” They talked, he interviewed, and Chan took the assistant city manager job in 2013. After almost four years, he was named interim city manager and began working to help recruit a permanent person for that job, and fate again intervened. “This is my city,” he says. “Sacramento has always been good to me. This was my way of giving back, and I went into it with every intention of helping transition someone else in.” The city ushered in a new mayor, and about three months later, Chan was called in for a chat. “The mayor said we’d been working great together, he felt I was a problem solver, and that I had respect in the city,” Chan remembers. “Then he said, ‘I want to see if we can remove that interim title.’ I have to tell you, my jaw dropped, and I got emotional. I wasn’t expecting it at all.” Once again, he went home to talk with his wife and children. He took the job in early 2017, and it’s been a wild ride since. “I had a budget to deliver, I had a police chief to appoint—arguably the most important appointment a city manager will make—I had to hire an economic development director, an assistant city manager, a diversity manager, and the treasurer, city clerk, and attorney were retiring. I think it was the first time in city history that we had a complete turnover of charter officials.
The quality of people you meet in parking and interact with, they’re people persons. They have great camaraderie, they focus their attention on customer service, they have a real sincerity in wanting to help people, and all of that has ingrained itself in me.
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Ironically, I’m the most senior charter officer, and I’m all of five months into it.” All that said, he loves his job. Loves it like people dream as children, not that they frequently dream of being city managers or parking professionals. And it’s the parking professional part, he says, that gave him a great foundation for the city manager part.
Parking
KIM FERNANDEZ is IPI’s director of publications and editor of The Parking Professional. She can be reached at fernandez@parking.org.
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“Parking definitely prepared me for all of this,” he says. “My dear friend Casey Jones—parking professional extraordinaire—and I have talked about this over the years: The quality of people you meet in parking and interact with, they’re people persons. The great camaraderie, they focus their attention on customer service, they have a real sincerity in wanting to help people, and all of that has ingrained itself in me. I carry it with me in my interactions with city staff, and I foster those relationships in the community.” He also has gained terrific perspective that helps him understand where city residents are coming from when they have issues. “Parking is very personal to people,” he says. “They get very passionate about it. It’s different—we ask people to pay for building inspection fees and they don’t mind, but they don’t understand why they have to pay for parking. It’s a disconnect. I can’t answer why people feel so passionate about it, but I know from experience that they do.” He also knows that learning on the job means asking questions, and he’s not shy about doing that. “There are things I’m getting up to speed on,” he says. “There are agreements that were inked decades ago that I’m trying to make heads or tails of, and I told my staff that I will not be shy about asking dumb questions. I We have staff who are subject matter experts who I consult with to solve complex issues.” Having worked his way up from frontline, he also has a big appreciation for how people feel when those above make decisions that affect everyone. “I remember when I was working the parking booth on Pier 39 in San Francisco, there were managers and supervisors who walked right by me without acknowledging that I existed, or some who just treated me like dirt. This was a 1,000-stall garage, open 24/7, and I was responsible for mopping every stall at night on the graveyard shift. I wouldn’t get it all done—there was pressure from the foreman to speed it up, and I’d say OK, but the reality was it was impossible. The stalls were always heavily stained, and I wanted to be diligent and clean them properly. “It was crazy that people didn’t acknowledge me,” he continues. “But those experiences play a role in who I am today. No matter how busy I am, how late it is, it’s impossible for me to walk by someone without making eye contact and saying hello. It’s very important to people,
INTERNATIONAL PARKING INSTITUTE | SEPTEMBER 2017
and it’s important to me. It would be very uncomfortable for me to do anything different.”
Going Forward Chan says his longtime experiences helped shaped him for his current role—up to and including hiring a colleague from the private sector to take over as parking services manager for the city. “One of the things we’ve been doing successfully is leveraging the city’s parking supply so we’re not just building standalone parking garages or lots,” he says. “That’s not the highest and best use of land.” He and his team have been establishing shared parking partnerships, so municipal garages that empty out at 5 p.m. can be used for the private sector nights and weekends. “That’s the pinch point,” he says. “We had to get elected officials from the state and city to agree, but we were able to negotiate a deal and have since expanded on this approach.” He’s also quite proud of the SacPark Program that modernized city parking operations, including $25 million in new technology, a mobile payment system, policy changes that reflect modern business practices, changes to residential permit programs that help residents find parking even when large events are going on, tiered pricing, and greater efficiency throughout the program. The city also recently launched Electrify America, which saw a $44 million investment in Sacramento to provide electric vehicle infrastructure to disadvantaged parts of town, allowing lower-income residents to realistically consider using zero-emissions vehicles for their work transportation (the city already had an EV car-sharing program specifically for low-income residents). As part of the new program, Sacramento was designated the first Green City in the U.S. by Electrify America. Chan has also made fighting disabled placard abuse a priority and is working to reduce and eliminate fraud in that area. “We have people going around town using placards from deceased relatives,” he says. “We have well more than 100,000 disabled placards issued by Sacramento, and we only have maybe that many on-street spaces throughout the city. If those people all show up at once—and I hope they don’t—they’ll put us out of business. We’ll continue to make the argument to state legislators that we have to change this.” He’s very supportive of California’s current efforts to audit its disabled placard system and is hopeful the audit will result in a finding of fraud. “We have to continue to chip away at this fraud that is perpetrated on our city every day,” he says. Mobility is another priority, and Chan says the city continues to push for alternative modes of transportation. All of this comes from parking, and Chan says that background has given him and his city a very bright future—there is lots more to come. “There is nothing else like the the people in the parking industry. They are the absolute best.”