SCARBOROUGH – If Judy Roy’s amendments to recommendations from the Higgins Beach Ad-Hoc Parking Committee hold, controversial parking and traffic issues at the popular Scarborough beach could be solved next month.

At a Town Council meeting on Dec. 15, Roy, who chairs the council and is a member of the parking committee, offered up some tweaks to recommendations to ban parking on all streets in the beach neighborhood from Oct. 1 to April 1, except for six spaces on Bayview Avenue between Pearl and Ashton streets. She recommended a 90-foot, year-round, 5-minute drop-off zone on Bayview Avenue; 10 spaces of one-hour parking in designated parking spaces on the ocean side of Bayview Avenue from April 1 to Oct. 1; and 14 spaces of year-round parking from the end of the one-hour zone to Vesper Street.

Currently, parking on Higgins Beach streets is not permitted from April to October.

Roy said she was trying to find a compromise between the concerns of the Higgins Beach homeowners, who want to see more parking restrictions, and those beachgoers, who are looking for easier beach access.

“I was trying to come to a middle ground,” she said.

While Councilors Mike Wood and Richard Sullivan voted against Roy’s proposal, it did gain the support of many of her fellow councilors.

“I will be happy to support this. I think it is a healthy compromise,” Town Councilor Jessica Holbrook said, although she said she would prefer two-hour parking to one-hour parking for the summer months.

Town Councilor Karen D’Andrea said she supports the summer parking, but wondered if there was a way to turn the drop-off zone into additional parking in the winter when demand for drop-offs is reduced.

Wood said he could not support the proposal. He said the increase in time was reasonable, but allowing on-street parking on Bayview Avenue in the summer is problematic and is in contrast to the town’s investment and development of the public parking lot on Ocean Avenue.

A number of Higgins Beach residents said the current situation, in which motorists are permitted to park on both sides of Bayview Avenue and other streets in the off season, creates safety concerns and the potential for a traffic accident, although none have occurred in recent years, according to Scarborough police Chief Robert Moulton.

“The lack of accident data,” he noted, “doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t an issue there.”

Connie Martin, of 9 Higgins Creek Road, who has lived on Higgins Beach for 70 years, said because of the narrowness of the streets and the density of housing, parking on Higgins Beach streets becomes difficult, especially in the winter when snowplows need to get through the streets.

Solving the on-street parking around Higgins Beach is but one parking-related issue before the Town Council now. Per the ad-hoc committee’s recommendation, the council is looking into the possibility of allowing the Higgins Beach Inn exclusive use of 14 nearby, year-round parking spaces on town-owned property on the corner of Ocean Avenue and Greenwood Street.

Co-owner Diane Garofalo said the inn has always had historic use of the spaces. She said in the 14 years she has owned the 113-year-old inn, they have maintained the spaces by seal coating, sweeping and plowing them in the winter.

Taking away those spaces – 50 percent of the inn’s controlled spaces – would make it difficult for patrons of the restaurant and inn to access the property.

The council permitted Town Manager Tom Hall to begin negotiating about an agreement with inn owners. Any agreement reached would come before the council again at a later date.

Holbrook said she supports talks moving ahead, but suggested a short-term lease. Wood said he was concerned that there has been a lot of time and effort put into looking to find a better parking around Higgins Beach and now 14 spaces close to the beach were being devoted exclusively to the inn.

A public hearing on the issue will be held at the Town Council’s Jan. 5 meeting for the public to weigh in about the parking recommendations.

Councilors also got their first look at plans for the beach parking lot acquired last spring. Hall said the plans, still conceptual, have been through a series of public reviews before Higgins Beach property owners and others.

Hall said he launched the process with three goals in mind: the lot be convenient, affordable and attractive enough to entice people to use it.

Hall proposes rehabilitating the lot to include 62 marked spaces accessed through an automated gate system, as well as the creation of a new bathhouse, complete with bathrooms and showers, amenities not currently available at the beach.

To offset the $290,000 needed to complete the project, Hall recommended an hourly parking fee to use the lot in the summer months, suggesting it be under $10 to be affordable to beach-goers.

There is potential for 20 additional spaces on a parcel of land north of the parking lot entrance, but that is not built into the plans at this time, Hall said.

“Whatever we do, I see this as an experiment,” Hall said. “The structure and fees could always be changed.”

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