Food for Thought

By Jorge Casuso

Feb. 7 -- For nearly two years, City officials have been grappling with a thorny question: How do you stem the exodus of restaurants pushed off the Third Street Promenade by escalating rents and retain a healthy mix of uses that will keep residents and visitors flocking Downtown?

The answer – which will be presented to the Planning Commission this month before it goes to the City Council for final approval – outlines a series of legislative changes that would expand outdoor dining and make it easier to expand existing restaurants and open new ones.

Proposed changes would also encourage restaurants on second floors and expand the types of alcohol service permitted in the Bayside District. In addition, it would limit the size of individual frontages on the Promenade to curb the influx of large retailers.

The recommendations come two years after the Promenade Uses Task Force began debating how to stop the Promenade from becoming another faceless mall and gauging what visitors wanted by conducting surveys, filming time-lapse images and mapping pedestrian patterns.

The task force found that unique shops and restaurants tend to draw more passersby than formula businesses, that creative high quality storefronts are a bigger draw than chain affiliation and that outdoor dining next to a restaurant disrupts pedestrian flow.

The task force also found that caps adopted by the City Council in the early 1990s to discourage restaurants and establishments that served alcohol were not even being approached. While the cap allows 76 “total food uses” in the district, in February 2003 there were only 59. Of the 52 allowed on the Promenade, there were only 31.

The proposed legislative changes would lift the cap on food uses, but keep the cap in place for alcohol outlets. “Without the cap, restaurants without alcohol service could open with as little as a business license,” according to a staff report issued last month.

The proposed changes would also allow restaurants with alcohol service to open with administrative approval, instead of requiring a Conditional Use Permit (CUP) staff contends is “an expensive, lengthy and uncertain process that creates a barrier for restaurateurs, particularly independent restaurateurs.”

These restaurant owners, staff suggests, “may not have the resources to both finance a prolonged approval process and pay the Promenade’s elevated rents.” If a proposed restaurant or restaurant expansion cannot meet the predefined standards, a CUP would be required.

The proposed changes, Bayside executive director Kathleen Rawson told the board last month, “are reasonable, in my opinion, and doable.”

To encourage outdoor dining, the Task Force also recommended that such dining be administratively approved without the need of a CUP, a recommendation the council adopted citywide last May.

The dining should be expanded to other areas, including the outside edges of sidewalks and the three courtyards on the Promenade, the Task Force said.

But the plan to expand outdoor dining away from restaurant frontages may encounter legal barriers. Using the public right-of-way as a private space available only to restaurant customers could leave the City open to legal challenges, City Attorney Marsha Moutrie has warned.

These dining areas could also create “choke points during rallies and marches,” according to the staff report.

If it could be difficult to expand outdoor dining on the street level, the Task Force is looking up for opportunities. In order to encourage second-story restaurants overlooking the Promenade, it recommended that signage be allowed more than 30 inches above the second-story floor signage line currently permitted.

In a recommendation already adopted by the City Council, the Task Force called for a 50-foot limit for frontages on the Promenade, unless they fall under a list of permitted uses that includes art galleries, dance studios, beauty shops, newsstands and cultural facilities.