EL PASO, Texas -- Whether it's at Three Legged Monkey and Wet Ultra Lounge in East El Paso, or in the Town Centre area, or on Cincinnati Street, all three parts of town have had the same thing in common: Successful bars, not enough parking, and angry residents.

So how come the bars with large capacities have such little parking?

"It's difficult to determine those things sometimes based on the use, our staff makes those calculations and we provide that back to the applicant," said Victor Torres with the city of El Paso Development Services.

The calculations put Town Centre along with Three Legged Monkey and Wet Ultra Lounge as part of a community shopping center, not under the nightlife category, because they are a part of a strip shopping center. Why does that matter?

In the nightlife category, businesses must have at least one parking spot per 100 square feet of gross floor area. Gross floor area is all of your square footage, even the area in between your walls.

The community shopping centers currently are only one parking spot for every 250 square feet of gross floor area. That's one and a half times fewer parking spots.

For the Cincinnati Street area, those are buildings built before the codes in 1956, so they don't conform to the minimum parking requirements.

"If it becomes a recurring problem, I think that council has to holistically take a look at the zoning codes to see how it can be changed to address some of these issues," said city Rep. Steve Ortega.

Ortega dealt with the Town Centre issue recently, and said it is better to work on this case-by-case, because out of the thousands of bars in El Paso, only a few have this problem.

"If you talk to the residents that live in the area that Town Centre is, they'll tell you the situation is much improved, the noise has gone down, the parking problems aren't existing," said Ortega.

As KFOX has reported, city council was going to look into putting up permit parking only signs for some of the neighborhoods near Three Legged Monkey and Wet Ultra Lounge. On Tuesday, they voted to allow those signs to go up.