July 7, 2026

By Mary Beth Gahan

On Monday night, the town council approved a change that would, on average, reduce required off-street parking spaces for commercial developments in Flower Mound by nearly a third and help with higher temperatures that asphalt causes.

Mayor Cheryl Moore said the move was “common sense.”

Still, the amendment had its critics.

The change implements a time-based shared parking model that takes into account peak periods that differ by the type of businesses that share the parking lot, like a hotel and entertainment venue or a shop and restaurant.

Three planned developments in town already use shared parking models: Lakeside, Furst Ranch, and the River Walk.

For the rest of town, as it was written before, a developer could increase or decrease the required parking spots by 20 percent. Any more than that, and they’d have to conduct a parking study and ask the town council for approval of the deviation.

Now, the amount of parking spaces needed is dictated by table — with the time of day on the X-axis, the type of business on the Y-axis, and the percentage of the lot filled at that time — and a little bit of math.

Based on the models the town has run, it has reduced the amount of parking spaces by 31 percent.

To come up with the table, the town used national benchmarks, but also conducted a local study to tailor the requirements to Flower Mound. They looked at 5 years of parking data, which included 120 sites in the town with 17 land uses, 108 different days of observation during all months, and 36,000 cars counted.

Parking trends have changed since the previous code was written, especially with the rise of curbside pickup, online shopping, and remote work. In Flower Mound, 29 percent of employed residents work from home, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

One of the town council’s strategic goals in 2024-25 was to reduce parking demand and increase the opportunity for open space, which this amendment intends to do.

It also reduces the cost to developers who have to build the parking lots.

“It can be pretty expensive, depending on where you’re building,” Nick Ford, senior planner, told the planning and zoning commission in late June.

The change also means less pavement laid in the town, reducing the heat island effect — a phenomenon that increases temperatures because a lack of green space that naturally cools and more asphalt that absorbs the sun’s heat and re-emits it.

Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization, researched the issue and reported on dozens of large U.S. cities. The data didn’t cover Flower Mound, but a census block at the northern tip of Dallas was 8 degrees higher than a rural area in north Texas.

The parking requirement change wasn’t without controversy.

Former council member Don McDaniel wrote on social media that the new formula had to do with the need for parking at the River Walk and the site of the proposed art center. At the meeting, Mayor Pro Tem Adam Schiestel asked Lexin Murphy, director of planning services, if that was true.

“The River Walk didn't have anything to do with this,” Murphy said. “There was nothing about the River Walk that initiated this discussion.”

When Schiestel asked if it had to do with large parking lots that are rarely filled, like in front of Target and Lowe’s, Murphy said yes.

“Any concern about parking at the River Walk and the art center is just a red herring,” Schiestel said. “ This is really about trying to reduce the amount of giant, flat lots that we have all over town that are baking in the sun with no cars there.”

Another prompt for the change was small businesses that wanted to move into a strip mall or other spot but couldn’t because their use would increase the amount of parking spaces needed and no more could be created. To do so, they’d need to conduct a parking study or become part of a planned development.

“That can be a burden to these small businesses because they’re not a developer, they just want to go into a shopping center,” Murphy said.

Owners of parking lots that are already built who want to change their parking allotment would need to contact the town.