A proposal submitted by a citizens committee examining parking in Lewes would, if implemented, make sweeping changes to the city’s parking situation in the downtown area.
The committee, comprising residents, business owners, and others, has been looking at the city’s parking woes for several months. Last week, committee members came in front of council at a work session to propose some solutions.
Specifically, the committee looked at Lewes’s downtown area, which includes both businesses and residential streets. Overall, according to committee data, there are about 1,150 parking spots in the area.
The committee’s proposal would allocate 353 of those spaces for residents under a formula that allocates one, two, or no street parking spaces based on how much off-street parking a house has.
“If you have no off-street parking, you get the possibility of having two passes,” explained parking committee member Kerry Tripp. “If you have one off-street space for parking, you get the possibility of having one off-street pass, and if you already have two or more parking spaces off-street, you get no passes.”
Those passes would likely not be physical passes at all, she said. Instead, license plate readers on police vehicles would ascertain whether a resident has a valid “pass.” The parking spots would not be assigned, meaning that even with a pass, a resident would not be guaranteed a spot in front of their house every time they park.
Of the remaining 797 spaces available in the downtown area, 100 are already metered. The rest of the spaces would be controlled by downtown-area businesses.
“Under our proposal, we're saying this is available to you businesses, you decide how do you want to use them,” Tripp said. “Do you want to have them for customers, visitors, employees? The business community will make that decision based on their needs to best keep their businesses profitable.”
Details on how businesses would control or divide up those spaces were not explained in the proposal.
The proposal would also allocate dedicated parking lots for employees of downtown businesses at Otis Smith Park and Schley Avenue, adding up to 200 new spaces. Those two proposed lots, which would require improvements, are around half a mile from the downtown business district.
That prompted concerns about safety from Mayor Amy Marasco.
“It's fine when it's nice out, but at night or when it's cold and it's dark, residents or employees walking to Schley raises a safety concern,” she said.
Councilman Tim Ritzert also had questions about employee parking, including the cost of improving the two lots, including paving and lighting. City Manager Ellen Lorraine McCabe said that an estimate from several years ago to work on those lots came in at $490,000 and that there was money for that in the upcoming budget.
One thing not in the proposal is a downtown parking garage, something that had appeared in similar proposals over the years, but never brought to fruition. Tripp said that the urgency of the city’s parking problems precludes a parking garage because it would take too long to complete.
“The Lewes community has repeatedly made clear that they need parking relief now,” she said. “The in-town residents have told us for years that parking isn't working for them. They can't find parking near their homes when they're bringing in their groceries.”
Tripp urged council members to act quickly on the proposal, laying out a three-phase implementation process, including a pilot program on selected blocks of three streets. Marasco, however, wanted to make the process more methodical, beginning with a public hearing in the coming weeks. She also made several recommendations for parking committee members to include in a presentation for that public hearing, like what metrics they would use to measure the pilot program’s success.
Council did hear from some members of the public at last week’s workshop, and while most speakers seemed supportive, they raised additional concerns, including the effects of new parking restrictions on the Lewes Farmers Market, and that having residential parking passes tied to a property owner’s license plate would be unfair to people who own short-term rentals, like AirBNBs.
