WILDWOOD – Mayor Ernie Troiano Jr., noting the tough parking situation in the Wildwoods over the Fourth of July weekend, brought up the notion of a municipal parking garage at the City Commission’s July 10 meeting.
“We’re looking into the possibility of creating parking garages, but we need some space,” Troiano said.
Contacted the following week, the mayor added that the city “technically doesn’t own any ground.” However, he said the city has parking in the center city area where someone could develop a parking garage and pay the owners of a parking lot under some arrangement.
“That is a far-fetched sort of idea, but it’s an idea,” Troiano said.
An alternative, he said, would be a parking garage at the Wildwoods Convention Center, which he said could be more practical. The mayor said a multistory parking garage on the Convention Center’s south lot would free up private parking lots for development.
Troiano described such a parking garage, connected to a hotel and having a covered parking area through which visitors would enter the building, saying, “That way people don’t have to walk three, four or five blocks in the wind, rain or snow.”
The mayor said there are really only 15 to 20 days per year when parking is exceptionally limited, such as the July 4th weekend.
“Summer doesn’t start until the Fourth of July,” he said. “Then by the second week of August some kids are going back to school, and their families aren’t coming down. It’s a very short window of inconvenience.”
Louis Belasco, executive director of the Greater Wildwoods Tourism Improvement and Development Authority, echoed Troiano’s estimation of the extent of the parking problem. Speaking on Thursday, July 18, Belasco said, upon looking out the window, that the Convention Center parking lot was 30% to 33% full.
“We operate the parking lots all day, every day, and on some weekends, we are full,” he said.
Belasco said decisions about building and operating parking garages always come down to economics.
“How much money do you spend to address such a problem?” he said.
He said his organization has not recently engaged in discussions with the city regarding parking garages, but added, “If the City of Wildwood wanted to have those discussions, we would sit in and have those discussions.”
Belasco said he has been part of such conversations in the past, particularly in Cape May, where he sat on its parking committee. He said discussions dated back before Covid, when the committee spoke to an individual who operated parking garages in Philadelphia.
The bottom line, he said, was the committee felt parking garages were not economical in Cape May. He said they have not looked into the matter for the Wildwoods.
Speaking on July 17, Troiano said there are factors that make such discussions more realistic. He said there are some properties that don’t have off-street parking, such as a driveway, that are always competing for summer parking.
He also said some people are converting their garages for other uses, such as “man caves,” which would otherwise be used for parking, and noted the trend to short-term rentals, such as Airbnb properties, with many people coming to Wildwood with three to five cars.
He said his neighborhood is not immune to the problem. “In my neighborhood we are busy,” he said. “We have an Airbnb next to me. One weekend, it’s a big place, they must have had 17 cars.”
Troiano said he still feels there is room for discussing a hotel and related parking garage, with help from private developers and state and federal funding.
But for most of the year, when parking is plentiful, he feels the year-round residents in Wildwood are a little spoiled. He added that when Oct. 1 comes around and the traffic lights are flashing, local people celebrate.
“When the traffic lights start flashing it’s one of the greatest days of the year,” he said. “I would put it right up with the Phillies winning the pennant, the Eagles winning the Super Bowl, or Christmas.”
Contact the reporter, Christopher South, at csouth@cmcherald.com or 609-886-8600, ext. 128.
