Jarams and Paciugo in Lakewood Get Biked Out of Parking Spaces; City Never Notified Current Owner

The Lakewood Advocate recently reported on bike lanes that put the squeeze on two small businesses along Abrams Road, locally-owned Jarams Donuts and Paciugo.

April Walding first opened a Paciugo in 2008. For more than a decade she built her business and even expanded her investments; in 2014, she secured financing to buy the spot her ice cream store is in. Then in 2018, the owner of the building approached her about buying the other half of the building, which now houses Jarams. She did. As cliché as it might sound, it's an American Dream-type story.

“I worked really hard to get the building,” Walding says. “I even paid off my loan two years early.”
She's the outright owner of the building, adores her tenants, Michael and Blair Ji, and her property investment and work have afforded her a bit of flexibility to raise her two young children.

The duo of doughnuts and ice cream in side-by-side spaces worked well together for years. Jarams draws in a morning crowd; customers would use the parking spaces in front of the building to dart in and grab breakfast before heading off to work or school. They close at noon, which before the pandemic is when Paciugo would open and another set of customers would use the same spots for scoops of ice cream late into the evening.

Things were hard with the pandemic hit. Walding closed her ice cream shop and focused on family, but as things start to thaw out in February 2021 — both the weather and COVID — she’d planned to reopen.

At that time, as the Lakewood Advocate first reported, the City of Dallas had started working on installing a bike lane in front of her building. Michael Ji of Jarams said they had no idea what the construction work was for when crews first showed up. They thought maybe it was a curb to protect the parking spaces.

Instead, the city installed a cement buffer (large curb) to protect a bike lane that would run in front of their stores and eliminate all parking in front of their stores. That space is now part of the Main/Columbia/Abrams bike lane that winds north along Abrams Road and (as to rub salt in the wound) ends just a few hundred feet beyond the building.

After 12 years of scooping ice cream, obtaining financing to own property, paying off loans early, why didn’t Walding speak up during the public forums about the lanes? Well, she never knew about them.

In February 2021, she, like the Jis, saw crews constructing the molding for a curb outside. She asked what they were doing, and only then did she learn their parking spaces would soon be gone. Why not find other parking? Well, because it’s Dallas, and parking is at a premium. Besides, people grabbing doughnuts in the morning usually want a quick in and out. The other available parking is about 100 yards south near a pet food store.
Walding contacted everyone she could, including multiple city council members, both former and current, in the districts she lives and works in, and had engineers from the city come out to beg and plead and suggest other options — including giving up a foot or two of her own property — to move the bike lane.

Why didn’t the city of Dallas notify a business owner that they’re going to lose their parking?

Kathyrn Rush, a chief planner with the city, says they did contact Walding, per Dallas City Code. Five times no less. They provided a copy of the mailer notifying property owners of a public hearing, as well as the addresses it was sent to, to the Observer. The mailers were sent from August 2018 to July 2019.

Alas, per the city records the mailers went to the previous owner of the space at an address on Lovers Lane. Even though Walding was the official owner when four of the five letters were mailed, the city pulled the mailing list just months before Walding became owner and never updated it. They pulled the list in August. Walding became owner in October.

"I noticed that four of those five notices were after I officially owned the building, but none of them were addressed to me," Walding wrote in an email after seeing the records.

Rush explained by email that "new appraisal data is made available in August of each year, therefore the same mailing addresses were used for all the above listed notifications."
After seeing a copy of the flyer she never received Walding was more frustrated. “If I did [receive it] I would have certainly attended any and all meetings. It’s obvious by how involved I am now."

A map on a mailer clearly shows the bikes lanes, in red, going in front of her business and warns that parking spots could be lost as a result of the construction of the bike lanes. “I would have loved to have received this,” she says.

Walding still doesn’t understand why they didn’t notify her when the plans were solidified. “Once they finalized it, once they knew they were definitely taking that parking, why didn’t they send something else, like certified, telling us we need to prepare?”

The owner of Jarams never received a notice from the city either, but since they aren’t the property owner, they weren’t intended to receive anything.
Michael Ji says business is definitely slower now that there's no parking in front. He estimates sales are down 30%. Customers still walk into the store but from unseen parking spaces; perhaps at 7-Eleven next door or from Abrams Parkway, which is in front of Hollywood Feed pet store and Cava. There’s a bank next door with a lot, but it’s not for their building.

Walding doesn’t see how reopening her ice cream shop is viable without any parking. She’s contacted other community members and they're working on a petition to file with the city.

“I don’t really know what happens after that,” Walding says. “Looking at numbers, I just feel like I didn’t get anything for my business for 12 years.”