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Boaters may get chance to stop for eats, movies

Downtown St. Petersburg must have courtesy slips, a City Council member says. He presses for nine at first.

By JON WILSON
Published December 14, 2005

ST. PETERSBURG - There are no waterfront boardwalks in the city's immediate future, but there could be some spots for boats to tie up temporarily.

That's the evolution of City Council member John Bryan's thinking about attracting boaters to visit restaurants and shops downtown.

For now the boardwalks are dead, a casualty of the intricate state permitting process.

Bryan has asked his council colleagues to consider converting 26 dock spaces in the Central Yacht Basin to 18 courtesy docks with meters. Boaters would feed the meters just as motorists do when parking their dry-land vehicles downtown.

A fee hasn't been determined, but Bryan suggested it would fall in the range of 50 cents to $1 an hour. Time limits would allow the skipper and passengers enough leisure to do the typical downtown routine: dinner, maybe a movie and shopping.

Bryan's idea is to place the courtesy docks between Fresco's restaurant and the St. Petersburg Yacht Club. The restaurant is at the southeast corner of Bayshore Drive and Second Avenue NE on the approach to the Pier.

The city marina has 610 slips available for rental. Some of those renters live aboard their boats, and Bryan concedes that some might oppose metered dockage. Boaters in general have, in recent years, found it more difficult to find docking space anywhere.

Even so, Bryan thinks St. Petersburg should do what it can to accommodate people traveling by boat and perhaps looking for a place to stop awhile and wander around on land.

St. Petersburg, Bryan said, should not be "a major waterfront city without one courtesy slip."

Marina residents were not asked their opinion, said Paul Barbour, resident of the Old Bayside Neighborhood and Marina organization.

He said a prevailing opinion doesn't necessarily exist among marina residents. But he suggested that it would be a good idea to consult people familiar with boating.

"Maybe it's like the cruise ship off the Pier. It sounds nice, but in practicality I don't know if it will work," Barbour said of the courtesy slips.

The courtesy dock idea first emerged more than three years ago. They were to be installed along with a waterfront boardwalk.

The state Department of Environmental Protection wanted more information about the plan, with no guarantee that permits ever would be issued.

The docks would salvage at least part of the project, Bryan thinks. Reallocated money from the boardwalk plan would pay for them.

"I think the (boardwalk) concept is still going to be there as an amenity for downtown. But the funding is going to be used for the courtesy docking and the landside path, which will take most of the account balance," Bryan said.

He proposes installing nine docks by next summer at a total cost of $40,000. Depending on demand, the other nine docks would be installed later.

Signs near the marina breakwater would tell boaters where to enter, Bryan said, and signs might also be used to say whether space remained on busy boating days.

[Last modified December 14, 2005, 00:14:15]