New Outdoor Seating Rules Cut Price, $25 Added Fee Would Aid Parking Fund

CAPE MAY – City Council’s April 18 meeting continued the effort to craft an ordinance on outdoor seating for consumption of food and beverages. 
Following a March public hearing, City Solicitor Frank Corrado was charged with drafting potential amendments that responded to the two major criticisms brought out at the hearing.
At that hearing, owners of restaurants and bars objected to the way in which the ordinance coupled regulating outdoor seating with the burden of the city’s seasonal parking problems.
To those merchants, the ordinance was placing the onus for parking issues on the back of only the food and beverage industry.
The ordinance set a per-seat fee for outdoor seating that would be paid into a parking trust fund intended to support expenses associated with options for improving the parking problem.
The other major objection to the ordinance during the March hearing was that the proposed fee, up to $300 a seat, was too heavy a burden to place on establishments, many of which already operated on thin margins.
The growing popularity of outdoor seating among tourists was not in doubt. Many who spoke against the ordinance said that it had veered from its original purpose concerning safety and appropriate regulation of a rapidly, but somewhat haphazardly, expanding amenity.
Late in the deliberations of the committee appointed to make recommendations on the seating issue, the administration added the task of looking at the resort’s parking problem.
That change, critics maintained, drew the hard work of the committee into a focus on revenue for some future parking solution.
The amended version of the ordinance proposed by Corrado showed that he and the council had heard and heeded the criticism.
What Amendments Do
First, they “decoupled” parking from the outdoor seating issue. The ordinance sets a $25 surcharge on all mercantile licenses so that the full community of merchants in the city is required to contribute to the parking trust fund.
Corrado said that the much lower $25 fee spread across the city’s broader business community would account for almost as much revenue for the trust fund as the proposed higher per seat fees which targeted only food and beverage establishments.
Second, the amendments established a process through which each restaurant must essentially update its approved seating plan to incorporate the outdoor seating that had largely never been included in approved plans.
The new process would not require business owners to go back through the more onerous zoning process, but it would require that the outdoor seats become a part of the regulated plan. As such, establishments would be subject to the counting in the calculation of future mercantile license fees.
This planning process will result in a higher mercantile license fee for a restaurant with additional outdoor seating but only because it finally brings the previously overlooked outdoor seating into the existing mechanisms for calculation of the fee.
Some one-time fees also apply for the application and review of the outdoor seating plans.
This process for review of required outdoor seating plans brings the ordinance back to its original focus since it establishes a process to ensure that outdoor seating arrangements conform to standards and safety regulations set in the ordinance.
Council voted to accept the amendments. The ordinance is set on a path for potential adoption at the council’s May 2 meeting.
Corrado said he would work with the Clerk’s Office to ensure that a copy of the amended version of the ordinance is immediately available for the public.
Prior to any vote to adopt the ordinance in May, there will be another public hearing.
To contact Vince Conti, email vconti@cmcherald.com.