Council to Review Parking on 1st and Orange

Coronado has four popular restaurants – , ,  and – huddled together near First Street and Orange Avenue. With their success has come an increased demand for parking.

One indictor is the number of parking citations issued in the area. Since January, there have been 187, according to a Coronado Police Department incident report. 

The parking rules restaurants have to comply with have been around since the early 1970s and some are quirky. 

“They are very old and they could be updated,” Ann McCaull, senior city planner said. 

She pointed out that shared parking has to be within 200 feet of a business, even though city blocks are 500 feet. Then there is the rule that says joint parking has to be on the same block.  

“Most people can walk a block,” she said.

The issue arose when the owners of . The business' tortured efforts to find them led the City Council to begin looking into ways to amend the old rules. 

When the idea was first proposed there was talk of reopening the Orange Avenue Corridor Specific Plan, adopted in 2004.

It was a community-wide effort “to create a vision for our downtown,” McCaull said, and included not only parking, but also land use, design and economic development elements. 

The idea was not universally embraced. “People made major concessions,” Coronado MainStreet’s executive director Rita Sarich said. “Everybody gave up something.”

The parkng review is a more technical approach that looks at what is working and what is not, with recommendations for the council to consider.  
Chamber of Commerce Chairwoman Ruth Ann Fisher has discussed the general thrust of the staff recommendations with McCaull and said that “there are opportunities for a policy that is more user-friendly. One that will work for both business and residents,” she said. 

The recommendations, which address other issues, including alcohol sales in restaurants (a persistent complaint for some neighborhood critics, will be presented to the council Tuesday. 

Former Councilman Phil Monroe doesn’t think the specific plan needs to be tinkered with to correct the parking problem. He chaired the committee that created it.

“The plan references the zoning ordinance. All the Council has to do his change the ordinance,” he said.

Yet change may not be all that easy, McCaull points out. Both the parking chapter of the zoning ordinance and the Orange Avenue Corridor Specific Plan are part of the Coronado Local Coastal Land Use Program, adopted in the 1980s. 

“Any changes to our parking must be submitted as a local plan amendment to the Coastal Commission,” McCaull said of the state panel. It requires a survey showing what impact, if any, the new parking rules would have on bay or beach access.  

If restaurant parking is a problem, the challenges presented by changing the rules could loom larger. 

“Maybe we find that while the joint-use ordinance is outdated, we don’t want to spend two years battling the Coastal Commission,” McCaull said.

“We might want to do something simple, that wouldn’t involve the Coastal Commission, like increasing meter fees to discourage people from staying so long.”