(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2022)
Caroline Street was closed during Chowderfest in March 2022. About 30,000 people visited Saratoga Springs that day.
Saratoga Springs restaurants and bars that want to use temporary outdoor dining this year will face a new payment structure as they apply for a permit to use the space.
Commissioner of Accounts Dillon Moran will propose tonight, Tuesday April 5 at the city council meeting, three levels of payment to accompany applications for temporary outdoor dining permits: $100 to use their own private property space such as private alleyways; $500 to use public sidewalks and grass buffers; or $1,000 to use on-street parking spaces or other space that require “barriers or blocks” for outside dining.
It’s a push to keep outside dining revenue neutral, that is not requiring subsidies from the city, he said in an interview last week.
"This is going to be a self-supporting process. This is not taxpayer supported," he said in that interview. There were no fees to apply for the permit in the past, he said today.
“The fees are going to support the costs and process of outdoor dining,” he said today. Much of the money will go toward the rental and movement of the jersey barriers, or large concrete blocks, that protect the outdoor diners using parking spaces.
“It’s all going in the same pot to support the same process,” he said of the fees. “We’re all in it together.”
He said he has support on the full council for this move.
The law that allows outdoor eating and drinking of alcoholic beverages was a pandemic-related move by the state. It was a way for the bars and restaurants to expand their dining rooms when COVID regulations kept occupancy at 50%.
The state law required municipalities to approve their own laws for this, and Saratoga Springs created a law and then updated it often since 2020. At the last city council meeting on March 22, the city extended the law through the summer of 2024.
The temporary permits for outdoor dining and drinking are not the same as “outdoor cafes” in the city, which are permanent extensions of the establishments onto the city sidewalks.
As well, Moran plans to pilot a program to close Henry Street between Caroline Street and Lake Avenue to traffic on weekend evenings, turning that block into a more open plaza. It’s an idea he ran on during the campaign last fall.
This is still only a draft plan and will go through a full planning and public hearing process, he said.
He said he has been talking to the businesses in the area about this. He said that discussion led him to this block because it is entirely commercial.
The block is home to many bars and restaurants including The Parting Glass, Henry Street Taproom, Karavalli Regional Cuisine and Trotters Bar and Grille, among others.
In a Daily Gazette article on a similar vein, former Mayor Meg Kelly said the idea of shutting down a city block to create a party atmosphere is “crazy.” She told the Gazette that street closures were tried in the 1980s and turned into “drunken brawls.”
[Read the Daily Gazette story here.]
Moran said that is “ridiculous” and that Kelly was creating hypothetical situations.
Moran pointed to the recent Chowderfest in downtown Saratoga Springs last month. It drew about 30,000 people without any major incidents. Plus, the city has had beer festivals, blues festivals and road races that have closed streets in the past.
"The idea that we are somehow walking out on a ledge that has never been there before is simply false,” he said.