By Woody Woodruff
Looking out my window of my shop on Main Street, I see a brand new $60,000 SUV pull up and park. Then the occupants pile out with all their beach gear and head down to the beach, leaving their car on Main street.
We have the cheapest beach parking around, yet you see the same scenario of people who can obviously afford parking, doing this all day long, every day on Main Street. Our small town has to subsidize them because they don’t choose to support all that it takes to keep our beach clean and safe, such as lifeguards and police for safety and equipment and personnel to physically clean the beach.
Also beach people, taking Main Street parking cuts into the tax revenue that each parking space can generate from people shopping and dining on Main Street. According to companies that advise cities and malls about parking, a single parking spot can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue. Just the money from meters alone, can be substantial.
We once had a mayor that put in meters to come up with new revenue to purchase property and create new parking lots, but with the promise to take them out once that was achieved. That is where we got the money to get our other parking lots and I believe that was done in a few short years. How much could all this revenue help our city now that it’s not doing good financially? Some might say, what about people that aren’t doing good financially and don’t have the money for parking?
I can tell you that I grew up extremely poor and most of the time we didn’t have money for the meter. But we didn’t expect anybody to pay for us to park right next to the beach.
We saw the lifeguards at the beach and the clean up trucks. We knew this all cost money. We just took our long boards and all our beach stuff and walked a few blocks to the beach. We were grateful for that beach, and we would pick up trash and carried it out with us when we left.
There’s some that say, “If people have to pay for parking, it’s gonna chase people away that want to spend money on Main Street.” I think most people that just want to shop, aren’t concerned with paying a couple of quarters to be able to park somewhere that is convenient enough to shop. I remember times that we didn’t have a men’s store or a photo lab and had to go over to Second Street in Long Beach. I would just look for the closest parking spot to the places that I needed to go, because I wanted to get my shopping done.
I could’ve gone a block or two away and got free parking, but like most people that are really going to spend any money shopping or dining, we really don’t care about paying a couple quarters more for convenience. As my wife said to me, “I’ve never in my life, not gone shopping someplace, because they had meters. That just doesn’t happen.”
Our town is too small to subsidize people that have money to park. People that really want to shop or dine, don’t really care about meters. They just want to get to the places that they want to use. I don’t think we should increase the cost of the Beach lot, but meter Main Street and give people motivation to use our inexpensive beach lot.
The city definitely needs the revenue at this point. And I do think it would alleviate a lot of the crazy traffic issues on Main street, like the insane U-turns in the middle of the street that we see all day long from people fighting over free parking. We had meters before and it never chased anybody away. It just made our city more economically viable.
Woody Woodruff is a Main Street business owner.
