At Thursday’s Board of Selectmen meeting, town administrator and COO Kate Buch presented recommendations for seasonal outdoor dining in in 2025.
The BOS are the town’s traffic authority. The P&Z dept is the lead department to review the outdoor dining applications.
One recommended change is to shorten the season to run May 23 through October 19, 2025.
The outdoor dining in parking spaces is not to exceed beyond the restaurant’s building frontage.
The second is to increase the fees for the jersey barriers that DPW uses to create the “nodes” over parking spaces.
The fee is proposed to be $1,536 per parking space or portion thereof for the season.
Also to increase the fees for the jersey barriers that form the “nodes” to reflect closer to the actual cost, though not the full cost to the town to install and remove them.
Last year the fee did not reflect the cost of labor. This year it is proposed to be $35 per linear foot. (To fully cover the cost of installation and removal would be $47 per linear foot.)
“We have not proposed going up to the full cost at this time. We are going to try to do that in phases,” Buch said.
First Selectman Camillo said the history of outdoor dining stemmed back to the Pandemic and ran all year to reflect that people were not comfortable dining indoors.
From there, outdoor dining was seasonal and ran from April through November.
“We found that in the past few years, people love it, but as soon as November hits we don’t see much usage of it,” he said.
Selectwoman Lauren Rabin said because of the reduced number of days for the season, the overall cost to participate for restaurants would decrease, and that each restaurant’s overall occupancy would remain unchanged, given that the outdoor seating comes out of their indoor capacity. For example if their occupancy is 50, and they seat 25 people outdoors, their indoor capacity is reduced to 25.
Occupancy is determined by the Health Dept.
Expanded outdoor dining made possible by removing four parking spaces. Aug 21, 2020 Photo: Leslie Yager
“It’s still an attraction for them,”Camillo said. “All the restaurateurs will tell you that having that option does help bring people there. And the sidewalk – they can go out there as long as there’s room for people to pass through. We always have to remind people of that.”
Ms Rabin said that last year there was a contest about how to make the barriers more attractive. And while the winning idea was for colorful “wraps,” they instead agree it would be easier for DPW to install flower boxes. Camillo said local landscape architect John Conte offered to help with the design.
Last year 49 parking spaces were turned over to outdoor dining on Greenwich Ave, which reflects 12% of the total spaces, which is 403.
Selectperson Janet Stone McGuigan said, “I am a supporter of outdoor dining, but we have to acknowledge there are people who love it, people who hate it and people who are indifferent to it.”
She said it was important to strike a balance with the need for parking by other businesses.
“We want to be fair to both the restaurants and the other businesses on Greenwich Avenue. We don’t want to kill the golden goose – we don’t want to provide so much outdoor dining that there isn’t parking to allow for diners to access these restaurants.”
Also she said outdoor dining ought not be viewed as a revenue generator to town.
However, she said, “We are actually under pricing the fact that we’re only charging restaurants the foregone parking meter fees – that definitely is not market value of what these areas are worth to the restaurants.”
Stone McGuigan said rather than be an iterative process, why not charge the restaurants the full cost incurred by the town?
Ms Buch said the actual linear ft cost is $47 for the barriers.
Last year the town took in $131,4376 in fees from 17 restaurants including $22,069 for barriers and $109,368 for parking stalls revenue.
The item was a first read for the Selectmen.
See also:
Selectmen Consider Shortening Outdoor Dining Season in 2024; ADA Accessibility & Compliance Urged Feb 2024