SEBASTIAN — After more than one year of planning, an artist’s rendering of the proposed parking lot improvements north of Sebastian’s Riverview Park, dubbed the “CavCorp” property, was revealed Wednesday night.
Six members of the public showed up to the public meeting.
The proposed $1 million revamp of the property, which has historically been a hodgepodge of boat trailer parking and public parking for events, has undergone at least one makeover and it may get another one.
City Manager Al Minner and Councilman Richard Gillmor said that another unnamed engineering firm, which worked on the project prior to Frank Hickson of Sebastian-based Infrastructure Engineers, had come up with a drastically different plan. The previous proposal had leveled many of the trees on the property and even relocated the clock tower and added a reflecting pool.
“It had everything being bulldozed, the trees were gone, the clock tower was gone. It was in the middle of Sebastian Boulevard,” Gillmor said.
Gillmor praised Hickson and his team for listening to the council and to the community and for devising a much better solution.
“I think you’ve tried to incorporate everything. I think you’re doing a wonderful job,” Gillmor said.
Minner and Hickson said public input received told the city in no uncertain terms that residents wanted to keep the trees and to either accentuate the clock tower or at least leave it alone.
“With the oak trees there, we wanted to make sure that whatever we designed that we did it around those oak trees,” Hickson said.
The two main concerns now are navigability of the boat trailer parking and maintaining a flexible layout that would allow the lot to be quickly converted to an intense event-parking use for the monthly craft and art festivals, plus the four major festivals of the city.
“There are events out there so we need to be able to convert a lot of this to event parking,” Hickson said.
The oldest of the major festivals is the Fourth of July Freedom Fest. In April, the Pelican Island Preservation Society hosts the Pelican Island Wildlife Festival. Then in the November is the Sebastian Clambake Festival, followed by the Sebastian Riverfront Fine Art and Music Festival in January.
“The city is incredibly proud of the four major events and we certainly want to make these work,” Minner said. “But the reality is that these are five days out of 365 days and we need to make sure we have a functioning parking lot the rest of the year.”
The current layout provides for 50 car spots and 60 boat trailer spots on a daily basis on the CavCorp property, plus an additional 28 car spots on Coolidge Street.
On event days, that would be converted to 154 car spots in the lot plus the same 28 on Coolidge Street. Indian River Drive is generally closed off to cars and boat trailers during major events.
Former City Councilwoman Lisanne Monier Robinson, who founded the Sebastian Riverfront Fine Art and Music Festival, said she was concerned about the loss of 50 parking spaces on event days.
She displayed an aerial photograph shot during peak time at the festival showing 247 cars parked in the lot and on Coolidge Street. The proposed plan would cut that down to a total of 182 spots.
“This is our only event park; this is it,” Robinson said. “Parking is the most important thing. Fifty parking spaces is a lot to lose.”
Robinson also read a letter into the record from Clambake organizer Anjani Cirillo expressing dismay that the leaders of the four major festivals did not have a say in the plan unveiled on Wednesday.
She pointed out that the city could afford to lose some of the aesthetic elements of the parking lot to free up space for more parking.
“It’s a parking lot, it’s not a Christian Dior. It needs to be functional,” she said. “People don’t come to Sebastian because we have a beautiful parking lot. They come to Sebastian because we have a beautiful river.”
As the meeting broke up, Minner and Robinson discussed ways to make the layout better. Minner said he would get together with event organizers and with Hickson to get input into the final design.
The proposal the city is asking the public to critique now is designed around the trees and the clock tower, adding green space and parking dividers or islands.
Hickson said he will be working with city staff to tweak the plan and once the City Council has decided on a final design, his staff will work on getting the design permitted by the St. Johns River Water Management District.
Questions, comments and suggestions should be directed to City Manager Al Minner at 1225 Main Street, Sebastian, FL 32958 or to aminner@cityofsebastian.org.
