At the Aug. 13 Chula Vista City Council meeting, Council voted unanimously to create a City Council subcommittee on bringing back to Council a proposal for the continuance of outdoor dining spaces, which were placed on Third Avenue during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The subcommittee will be filled by Mayor John McCann and Councilmember Jose Preciado.
McCann said outdoor dining offers numerous benefits of enhanced ambiance, better ventilation, sunlight, and fresh air.
“Outdoor dining has made it a very popular choice for both diners and restaurant owners,” he said. “The mission [of the subcommittee] will be to bring outdoor dining recommendations to formalize the policies back to this council that they will hopefully approve or debate it at least. These will be policies that will cover the entire city. It will be from the bayfront to Broadway, to Third Avenue, to the eastern side. We do have Gaylord which will be opening in May 2025, and we want to make sure we are attracting many of those visitors into our city to be able to have them enjoy the restaurants and our businesses, to bring revenue to them and to help create jobs. The subcommittee will be working with stakeholders. The subcommittee will have its first meeting within 30 days and provide a status report back to City Council within approximately 120 days.”
In public comments, John Acosta said typically, outdoor dining is great, but the subcommittee needs to address problems with parking, and to remember that Chula Vista’s Age-Friendly Action Plan was adopted in 2018. He said the current parking situation prevents many seniors from frequenting downtown Chula Vista during the evenings and weekends. He suggested making the outdoor dining areas “thinner” to maintain walking space on the sidewalks and not allowing the outdoor dining areas to take up so many parking spaces.
“Keep in mind that the city needs to accommodate the seniors and disabled,” he said. “I like the idea of outdoor dining, but how is that going to affect the parking? Keep that in mind.”
Chula Vista Brewery co-owner Timothy Parker said he opposes outdoor dining areas.
“At one point, everybody that had a bar or restaurant had an outdoor patio out there,” he said. “Then Council decided to make a committee and gave that committee over to the association [Downtown Chula Vista Association]. That association decided that only that their board members should have an outside dining patio. If you go and look at the outdoor patios today, only board members have outdoor dining patios. Everybody else had to take down their outdoor patios.”
Parker said the patios were paid for by taxpayers, and when businesses talk about all the money they spent on their patios, they never mention the grants that were given to help them do so, and that it put other businesses at a disadvantage.
“Those patios at three square footages, that got paid for by the taxpayers, meaning that they can have more people than me now for free,” he said. “We had to take down all the patios that we paid for. I did not get a grant for my patio. I paid cash for my patio. Now they want to come up and say they are victims of what the taxpayers paid for. Don’t do it. Take it all away and give everybody a fair advantage.”
Parker said that The Vogue takes up six parking spots and a food truck.
“Please, we need to stop playing games with that association and help all the other businesses. Quit putting businesses at a disadvantage. Make it equal, make it fair,” he said.
Groundswell Brewing Owner Kevin Rhodes said he is in support of the subcommittee, believes that it is fair, and the committee should involve every business in talking about outdoor dining.
“I do believe that the committee should be citizens, customers, business owners, as well as the city,” he said. “Legislation is done best when all the constituents are involved, and we can talk about all the issues involved and how we can solve them together.”
Rhodes said it is hardship to take the patios down, then put them back up.
“I, better than anyone on Third Avenue knows,” he said. “I put up a whole structure. It cost me about $12,000. Then I was asked to take it down because the city had a new standard, so I took it down. I put it back up. Yes, I got a $15,000 grant but it cost me $23,500. If we take this down again and you ask me to put it up later under a new ordinance, it won’t happen. We are kind of going backwards on Third Avenue. We promised Gaylord we would have this vibrant Third Avenue, and taking things down and pushing everything inside, it is just not going to be exciting.”
Downtown Chula Vista District Manager Dominic Li Mandri said the association supports an outdoor dining policy citywide.
“The outdoor dining policy was implemented after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, and certain businesses were afforded the right to extend their operation to adjacent parking because at the time, state law required bars and breweries to serve food. That is where a lot of the parklets came from, and also the food trucks ended up on Third Avenue and remain today,” he said. “For the past two years the outdoor dining areas have been a benefit to business owners and community members. It places a sense of vibrancy and vitality that very much so, we consider an advantage to us to attract Gaylord clientele to Third Avenue.”
Li Mandri said he had some recommendations to provide more equity to all businesses.
“Create a subcommittee to work with the Third Avenue district businesses. Some of them have a lot of experience managing parklets in public right of ways in the past two years, and that insight and experience can definitely help produce a more expeditious solution to downtown residents and businesses,” he said. “I would ask that the subcommittee consider expanding the program to all types of businesses, not just the bars and breweries. We think the expansion and more inclusiveness of this program would help resolve some of the past inequitable stances and history of the program. And the third recommendation is that the city consider creating an improvement fund to help the businesses that do have parklets, replace them a later time as we understand parklets were afforded by a grant attained by the city and many of the brick-and-mortar businesses on Third Avenue that do have parklets are undercapitalized and cannot afford to rebuild a $15,000 parklet. But the city does have existing programs like the Façade Improvement Program where they offer matching funds to private businesses to improve their façade. If a similar policy could be made for improving a frontage improvement program, I think that would go a long way in providing a solution to some disgruntled operators on the block.”
