VERO BEACH — City Manager Jim O’Connor is set to meet with Ocean Drive hoteliers and other business interests at 10 a.m. Wednesday to identify potential solutions to the lack of parking along the beach.
Last week, city officials announced that police would start enforcing the 2-hour parking limit posted on signs on Saturdays as well as weekdays, beginning Nov. 8.
Mayor Dick Winger said at both Monday’s and Tuesday night’s City Council meetings that he was concerned about $20 parking tickets surprising Vero’s residents and guests sending the wrong message. Winger asked that warnings be given initially until word spread about the Saturday enforcement, but he was told that was not practical.
Lee Olsen, general manager of Waldo’s and the Driftwood Inn Resort explained that on a busy Saturday, restaurant patrons typically wait in the lobby or at the bar for 45 minutes to an hour for a table, he said, “Giving them just an hour to enjoy, what we think is the best view in Vero Beach.”
If patrons linger a while longer, they could return to their vehicles to find a parking ticket for over-staying the two hours.
Olsen and the Assistant General Manager from the Holiday Inn Oceanside will be in the room with O’Connor and, though no one had any concrete ideas as of Tuesday night, the hope is that a workable solution can be devised in the next few weeks before snowbirds return to Vero’s shores.
The work group is not an appointed, Sunshine committee that meets in council chambers, but an informal ad-hoc committee which meets in the city manager’s conference room upstairs at City Hall.
The enforcement of the two-hour parking limit on Saturdays was requested after a vote of the Board of Directors of the Oceanside Business Association (OBA). Several Ocean Drive merchants have complained about this to the city, saying that the OBA does not speak for them or for their commercial interests.
