Over an hour was spent at Midland council as the topic of downtown parking returned, led by two downtown business owner councillors who put scrutiny on outdoor patio spaces.
On King Street between Dominion Avenue and Bay Street, Coun. Bill Meridis runs a home store and is a landlord for that building’s tenants while across the street Sheldon East is the owner of a fine jewelry shop.
Council received a staff report at the recent meeting regarding a 2023 pilot project for downtown sidewalk usage, which included an analysis of the outdoor patio program established during the COVID-19 pandemic as a means to assist downtown businesses.
Almost immediately, Meridis pounced on the matter of outdoor patios, noting that there had been no ramifications for businesses taking advantage of the blockage of parking spaces to provide restaurant visitor seating.
“The problem that I’m seeing downtown is that when you apply for a patio permit,” said Meridis, “that permit allows you to take up more than one parking spot for your patio.
“The problem is where the bollards are situated, and when the bollards get extended into the parking area, it’s taking up maybe a third or sometimes a half of another parking spot."
East also chimed in with similar issues, but targeted the redesign of the King Street ‘Big Dig’ reconstruction project completed in 2021.
Citing parking problems since council had cancelled its parking meter kiosks and sold them last year, along with selling a brownfield Bay Street municipal parking lot, East attacked the black painted delineation bricks in the grey parking spots along the street as another reason why downtown parking was suffering.
Meridis proposed an amendment to limit patios up to two spaces, for a cost of $500 per space.
Further discussion involved Mayor Bill Gordon and town staff explaining that because of the inconsistency of downtown storefronts, as some tiny businesses result in being slightly more width than a door and window, parking spaces out front could be ambiguous; the result was rewording the amendment from ‘parking space’ to a calculated square metre for clarity purposes.
However, East returned to his observations from his storefront vantage.
“You can have one car parked and then no cars can park around it because those black bricks don’t mean nothing. I’m telling you, whoever designed it must have been off in La-La Land because they park wherever they want,” said East who immediately requested visible sight lines for parking spaces.
The comment prompted engineering manager Mitch Sobil to back the efforts of the steering committee for the council-approved design of King Street. Originally no lines had been endorsed, Sobil told East, but staff had anticipated problems and made a compromise.
“We tried our best to implement a way of the design that we could delineate parking spaces without taking away from the design intent of the steering committee,” said Sobil. “That was how we ended up with the black lines.”
Sobil had received a Municipal Concrete Award in 2021 on behalf of the town and engineers from the Ontario Good Roads Association for the ‘Big Dig’ project.
Coun. Jamie-Lee Ball asked staff if the bollards could be removed, with Sobil responding they could but at a cost due to their being set in concrete. The comment allowed legal and risk advisor Julie Ellery to remind council that the bollards were in place for pedestrian and patio user safety.
Meridis relented, admitting he “didn’t want to open a can of worms” with his amendment, but stayed true to his intent.
Council voted in approval of the amendment that for 2024 an outdoor patio space on town property would cost $500 for a standard 18.76 square-metre area, with an additional rate of $26.65 per square-metre up to a maximum of two spaces total be added. The matter was later added to a fees and charges bylaw motion in the meeting, and approved there as well.
The outdoor patio and municipal property usage report is available in the council agenda on the town of Midland website.
Council meetings are held every third Wednesday, and can be viewed on Rogers TV cable channel 53 when available, or through the livestream on the Rogers TV website. Archives of council meetings are available through Rogers TV and on the Town of Midland’s YouTube channel.
