Kincardine council is directing municipal staff to bring back a report on a pilot project aimed at implementing paid parking at Station Beach and MacPherson Park.
Councillor Beth Blackwell started the conversation saying that there could be a benefit to having visitors pay for parking at the beach, namely the revenue form tourism, but the cost would be too much.
“When thinking about the amount of time and staff resources it would take… My preference would be a municipal accommodation tax, which I think would potentially bring in significantly more revenue. I just don’t feel that our beach is set up appropriately for paid parking, with all of the access locations,” said Blackwell. “We have 40-something kilometres of beach, so it just starts to feel like we’re directing people to areas where we don’t have amenities, where we don’t collect garbage or we don’t have bathrooms. And I think it would be a really big challenge. If I was given potential options for additional revenue, I would look much more quickly at a municipal accommodations tax before looking at paid parking.”
Councillor Rory Cavanagh says that while he supports the idea of a municipal accommodations tax, he does not support charging local residents for access to the beach.
“Where my concern comes from is we have a lot of traffic coming from out of town, they use our roads, they use our washrooms, they fill the garbages and they leave. And it’s our taxpayers that have to pay for those services to make it better.”
He says that introducing paid parking would ensure that visitors would pay for the services that they use while at the beach, but other members of council didn’t support the option that would result in residents of the municipality also having to pay.
Council also considered the amount of cost in getting information on a pilot project in terms of how many hours staff would need to spend on the information gathering, and felt as though it wasn’t worth it.
Prior to the vote, councillor Bill Stewart said that as a long-term resident and user of the beach, he couldn’t justify the move to charge for parking.
“I would probably come with a very strong argument not to charge for parking. The beach is really there for everyone. It’s a little bit inconvenient for two or three months of the year, but I just can’t see ourselves using our resources on a pilot project. I think we have enough on our plate with staff and everything, and I don’t think it’d be a good use of resources.”
