Commissioners urge review of large parking lots, EV readiness and heat-island effects

A commissioner at the Aug. 14 Castle Rock Planning Commission meeting urged the panel to consider revising zoning rules to reduce heat-island effects from large surface parking lots and to require features such as electric-vehicle charging and solar shade structures.

The commissioner noted that current zoning requires a set number of parking spaces and that large lots can become heat islands. “I want to invite the commission to start thinking about how can we look at our zoning rules and try to minimize the impact of large areas of black asphalt in our community,” the commissioner said during the staff-update portion of the meeting.

Tara Vargasch, a town staff member in attendance, responded that the town already requires landscaping in parking lots and that some projects have installed EV chargers voluntarily. Vargasch said trees and landscaping can fail without ongoing irrigation and maintenance, which reduces their buffering benefit over time. She also said state law changes coming over the next few years will require some new multifamily and commercial projects to provide certain EV-charging or “EV charge-ready” capacity.

A separate staff speaker noted the town has a downtown master plan addressing parking and that a parking study is expected to begin soon; that study will look at parking management and alternatives. Commissioners and staff agreed the issues present tradeoffs between ecological goals and practical parking needs for businesses and health-care facilities.

No formal action was taken on zoning changes; commissioners requested that staff track the items, including state code updates and the planned downtown parking study, for future work-program consideration.