If it’s high season in Vero Beach, you can bet the City Council will, at some point, bring up a perennial issue – the daytime parking shortage along Ocean Drive.
Those conversations are as much a part of winters here as the arrival of out-of-state license plates, but any proposed solutions always seem just out of reach.
Even with the council already juggling several major projects expected to impact the community for generations to come – developing the Three Corners, relocating the city’s wastewater-treatment plant, expanding the municipal marina and improving Vero’s downtown – Vice Mayor Linda Moore felt compelled to bring up the Ocean Drive parking topic at last week’s meeting.
The only real surprise was that it took until the final days of February for someone to mention it.
“Talk about waking a sleeping bear,” Moore said, opening the council’s latest discussion of the city’s in-season parking dilemma along the Main Street of its beachside business district.
What about the Ocean Drive parking quandary awakened the discourse from its yearlong hibernation?
Time limits.
Specifically, it was a request from Waldo’s restaurant General Manager Lee Olsen to extend from two hours to three the length of time motorists may legally park.
Olsen argued the two-hour parking limit – especially during Vero’s busy season, particularly during the lunch rush – doesn’t allow restaurant customers enough time to dine.
He cited the almost-daily waits to be seated that some customers choose to not endure, because their parking time limit will expire before they finish their meals.
“I invite any of you to join me at the hostess desk on a weekday, when there’s a 45-minute wait and the customer looks at his watch and says, ‘I’ve got to go, because we went shopping and now we don’t have time to wait or we’ll have to pay the ticket,’” Olsen told the council members.
He also reminded them that the two-hour limit is in effect only along Ocean Drive and four adjacent side roads, pointing out that everywhere else in the city – including on Cardinal Drive, also in the beachside business district – the limit is three hours.
“I’m not asking for a miracle,” Olsen said. “I’m asking for an even playing field.”
Moore, for one, was sympathetic.
The co-owner of The Kilted Mermaid restaurant in downtown Vero Beach, Moore acknowledged that the council had “gone back and forth on this issue several times over the years,” and she agreed that the lunch-rush wait times for tables makes the two-hour parking limit a challenge.
“By the time you get seated, you have to move your car,” Moore said. “Two hours is not enough.”
The city reduced the Ocean Drive time limit from three hours to two in 2018, after merchants complained that parking spaces near their shops too often were being occupied by beachgoers and employees of nearby hotels and restaurants.
The merchants argued that the reduced limit would discourage non-customers from parking there.
Council member Tracey Zudans said she, too, was receptive to a return to the three-hour time limit – but only if the move is endorsed by a majority of the Ocean Drive business owners.
She said it is “super difficult to park over there,” but she wanted feedback from the merchants and restaurateurs before agreeing to any change. During the meeting, Mayor John Cotugno said he was reluctant to amend the time “because we’ll be back discussing this again next year.” Last weekend, though, he reconsidered.
“Whatever the business owners want is fine with me,” he said.