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Credit to: Coastal Point, Kerin Magill
A committee advocating for Fenwick Island business owners will ask the Fenwick Island Town Council later this month to offer parking passes to businesses at a reduced rate, as one way to help alleviate employee parking issues in the town.
Fenwick Island’s Business Concerns Committee discussed the move at its Tuesday, May 6, meeting.
The group, chaired by Council Member Kurt Zanelotti and comprising current and former business owners and residents, will ask the council at its May 23 meeting to consider offering parking passes to businesses in town at a reduced rate of $450 — a 10 percent reduction from the standard $500 rate for seasonal parking passes that are available to residents.
At the April town council meeting, Mayor Natalie Magdeburger made a presentation reflecting potential open spots on side streets around town where employees might be able to park, but for the most part, the available spots would not be practical for employees of town businesses.
During that meeting, Magdeburger urged the business community to work together to find a solution to the perennial employee parking issue. For several years, the council has encouraged business owners to work together to come up with a system of sharing parking spots between businesses. For example, a business that is open primarily early in the day could offer parking privileges to employees of neighboring businesses that are open at night, such as restaurants.
That concept has stalled in the past because town regulations prohibit any money from changing hands for such arrangements. Despite that restriction, the idea has not been rejected by the business committee.
During Tuesday’s Business Concerns Committee meeting. Scott Mumford, former owner of Warren’s Station Restaurant, said he felt the committee is “moving in a good direction now. When it comes to business-to-business parking, I think we’re in a better place,” Mumford said, adding “there is an ordinance in the town that needs to be addressed,” referring to the pay-to-play prohibition.
Mumford was the first to broach the idea of reduced fees for parking passes for businesses, calling it an “olive branch” that the Town could offer the business community.
Zanelotti said an earlier suggestion of offering businesses a rate of $250 for a seasonal parking pass was discussed, but with the idea that the passes could only be used on certain side streets. That was not practical, he said, “because we’re not Bethany. We don’t have lots of street parking.”
He said the parking woes for employees have increased in recent years, in part because more employees are driving to work than in years past, when many were teens who bicycled to work from their families’ summer beach homes.
Today, Zanelotti said, employees are more likely to be J-1 international student workers or older employees who drive to Fenwick Island from surrounding communities.
“The workforce has changed,” he said. “College kids,” who once represented a large segment of the summer workers, “are going to Europe in the summer or whatever.”
Tim Collins, owner of the Southern Exposure clothing store, told the committee members that he feels they and the council need to consider whether parking restrictions on side streets between 4 and 10 p.m. are counterproductive.
“If the Town is going to stick with the restriction between 4 p.m. and 10 p.m., they need to do something [to help] business employees,” Collins said.
“Two things need to happen,” Mumford said: asking the town council to consider offering passes at a reduced rate of $450 to business owners, and that there be no restrictions on where and when those passes can be used.
“We need to get the ball rolling,” Mumford said.
Of the suggestion on the table at the committee meeting, he said, “It’s a simple gesture from the Town to say, ‘We hear ya,’ and it would ease some of the parking problems.”
In other business, Committee Member Lucy Wilder said the plans for the upcoming Cruise Around Town event, scheduled for May 31, are moving forward.
The next meeting of the Business Concerns Committee is scheduled for 9 a.m. on June 3.
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