Yacht club hopes amendment sails through

Deirdre Newman

Some neighbors of a yacht club, upset by club members treating their

Irvine Terrace streets as a parking lot, are pleased with measures

the club is proposing to direct parking off city streets.

Bahia Corinthian Yacht Club officials are now hoping the Planning

Commission will give its blessing to the club’s plan to increase

parking.

Tonight, the commission will reconsider a change to the club’s

operating permit. The amendment would increase the club’s parking

capacity to 129 on-site parking spaces, use off-site parking during

certain times at an office complex across the street and use valet

parking when necessary.

The club’s request to change its permit provoked controversy

earlier this summer in the neighborhood because it originally asked

to reduce the required amount of on-site parking from 122 to 95

spaces. The club, at 1601 Bayside Drive, was making only 86 of those

parking spaces available.

Neighbors like Val Skoro, who also is a member of the city’s

Parks, Beaches and Recreation Commission, has been won over by the

new plan.

“Residents appreciate [the club] recognizing the problem and

taking some action to rectify it,” Skoro said. “The city staff and

Planning Commission, under Chairman Larry Tucker, did a great job

listening to residents’ concerns and coming up with a viable

solution. We want the yacht club to be there. They’re good neighbors,

and it helps the whole community.”

The Planning Commission has postponed a decision on this issue

three times to give the club time to put together its

parking-management plan and to give staff members enough time to

review it.

The yacht club, which has been in the neighborhood since 1972,

started working to alleviate neighbors’ concerns as soon as neighbors

voiced them to the city, said Karen Winnett, one of the club’s

directors. The parking was reduced around 30 years ago, when one of

the club’s leaders decided to reduce parking in order to increase

boat storage, Winnett explained.

To smooth over the negative feelings that ensued, the club hired

Hogle-Ireland, a land-planning and development consulting firm, which

immediately started outreach into the neighborhood through letters,

phone calls and meetings. Through this outreach, the club was able to

relieve a lot of the neighbors’ frustration, said Leisa Brug, the

project representative with Hogle-Ireland.

“I describe it as miscommunication,” Brug said. “A lot of it

dissipated once we opened our doors and started talking. [The

neighbors] were happy to be talking.”

Some of the changes the club has already made to increase the

amount of parking on site are opening up a gate that was previously

at the entrance to the club and eliminating reserved parking for the

club’s officers. The gate created two problems by prohibiting

non-members from parking in the club and caused a back-up on Bayside

Drive as members waited to get through the gate, said Paul Ireland, a

partner with Hogle-Ireland.

“I think the neighbors will tell you that just doing that made a

huge difference,” Winnett said.

Because of the changes the club is making to increase the parking,

it will be losing about 40% of its dry boat storage, which means that

some members will not be able to store their boats at the club,

Winnett said. To be able to store the rest of the boats on-site, the

club invested in some aluminum-frame racks that the neighbors approve

of, Winnett added.

Planning Commission Chairman Larry Tucker said he hopes the

conditions staff members have recommended for approval are agreeable

to both sides. Those requirements include reviewing the club’s permit

by Sept. 30, 2005.

“It just seems sensible at the end of the day to look back and see

if all these plans and projections work, and if not, we’ll take it

back and try to figure out how to make it work,” Tucker said. “The

neighbors have legitimate concerns, and the club is a valued use for

the harbor.”

* DEIRDRE NEWMAN covers government. She may be reached at (949)

574-4221 or by e-mail at [email protected].