Council weighs home-town advantage for beach parking

WAUKEGAN -- Parking is shaping up to be a hot issue this summer.

At its April 21 meeting, the City Council held yet another discussion about the downtown parking plan it adopted late last year and also began deliberations on what to do about parking at the municipal beach this summer.

The council received a list of requests from the local business association to change the terms of the downtown parking plan, including shortening the enforcement period from 7 p.m. to 5 p.m., reducing parking fines from $20 to $10 and extending the free-parking period from one to two hours.

The council did not formally adopt any of the requests but agreed that Mayor Richard Hyde has authorization to direct Police Department to reduce the enforcement period to 5 p.m. on a temporary basis. Hyde said he will do that.

Eighth Ward Ald. Richard Larsen objected to tinkering with individual aspects of the plan.

"There are a lot of factors involved in making this thing work," he said. "Just making partial changes to something that is already existing is not the answer to our problem here. Let's not shoot from the hip and be making changes every council meeting on the parking ordinance. I don't think we should be doing this piecemeal."

Beach parking is a special concern this summer because one-third of the parking lot will be closed during dismantling the coke plant as part of lakefront redevelopment. Since the city stopped charging for nonresident beach parking four years ago, the beach has been attracting huge crowds on weekends, averaging 4,000 visitors a day.

That's a good sign for tourism, 3rd Ward Ald. Greg Moisio said, but not so good for city residents who should enjoy priority access to the beach.

"It's out in northern Illinois that Waukegan's got a great beach," Moisio said. "People want to come down there. ... (But) the last thing that I want to do is not allow people of Waukegan to go to their own beach because they can't find a place to park. But I also don't want to close down (the beach to nonresidents) because that may be a destination that we can help with the downtown. So we have to find a balance. How do we do it?"

Ninth Ward Ald. Rafael Rivera suggested forming a task force to develop a plan that balances public safety issues with tourism interests for lakefront parking this summer.