Yachats council lets Covid-inspired restaurant outside seating waiver expire and begins to enforce off-street parking regulations

 

By KENNETH LIPP/YachatsNews

YACHATS — A Covid-era parking space waiver extended five times was allowed to expire last week, potentially resurfacing conflict between the city of Yachats and a brewery owner.

After Gov. Kate Brown prohibited indoor service at restaurants and later drastically reduced their occupancy three years ago, Yachats joined many other cities in adopting measures to expand outdoor dining space.

A council resolution adopted in April 2020 allowed restaurants and bars to use up to four of any required off-street parking spaces  for outdoor seating. The number of spaces is tied to square footage of the building. Several Yachats restaurants used the waiver to expand outdoor seating. Originally set to expire in September 2020, the resolution was repeatedly extended, most recently in November.

During the Yachats City Council’s regular meeting Feb. 15, city manager Heide Lambert said the restaurants that still have outdoor seating under the waiver were not following the terms of the ordinance. The council ultimately voted 4-1 to allow the waiver to expire Feb. 28.

One of those restaurants, the Underground Pub, has since removed a Conex shipping container from the property, opening up four of its six off-street parking spaces.

Nathan Bernard, owner of Yachats Brewing, says his covered outdoor seating area was in place before Covid and did not affect its required parking capacity. He said the restaurant has all the parking it needs in the lot of a nearby dispensary housed on property he owns.

Bernard has repeatedly clashed with city and Lincoln County officials over not getting permits for constructing the brewery onto an existing building in 2014, although neither the city nor county has taken any action to interfere with his operation. He says the county has made the permitting process impossible.

An emergency exception

Restaurants in Oregon laid off or furloughed 80 percent of staff after the governor, just prior to her March 20, 2020 “stay home” order, mandated restaurants only serve take-out or delivery.

To help restaurants and bars, the state issued special outdoor liquor licenses and local governments made moves to increase outdoor seating options, such as Yachats parking waiver.

But nothing was ever done to verify that businesses abided by the waiver’s requirements, Lambert said, and those still using it were not.

“They’re not getting consent from their neighbors, they’re using more than four parking spaces, and they’re not using temporary structures, some of them actually qualify as permanent structures,” Lambert said. “And code enforcement cannot enforce this, because it’s expiring at the end of the month.”

Lambert said the Planning Commission was in the process of developing parking management recommendations for council’s consideration. But commission chair John Theilacker said none of those recommendations involved changes to code.

“These are more actual brick and mortar improvements,” Theilacker said, adding that they referred many of the recommendations to the Public Works & Streets Commission as they would be under its purview to implement.

Lambert said she recommended reverting to the baseline parking rules while the commission completes its work and “getting that under control.”

Councilor Greg Scott said he wanted a parking management plan to consider restaurants that serve a lot of walk-up business as well as improvements the city has made to public parking options.

“I’m actually looking for parking regulation that’s more flexible,” he said. “And actually, I’m shocked to hear myself and I shouldn’t say this in public, but I’m looking for a more business-friendly outlook.”

Lambert said it was business owners complying with the regulations that “are the most disgruntled.” One restaurant uses its entire immediate frontage spaces as seating, pushing patrons into neighbors’ lots, she said.

“In this resolution, it says they have to have consent from neighboring businesses, and that never was collected,” Lambert said.

Councilor Ann Stott asked if letting the resolution expire would allow the city to compel removal of the shipping container outside the Underground Pub. Lambert said that was a separate code enforcement issue.

“But that business still is lacking parking,” Lambert said.

Stott clarified that there were just two businesses — Yachats Brewing + Farmstore and the pub — in obvious violation. Lambert confirmed.

Councilor Catherine Whitten-Carey asked why the city couldn’t enforce the conditions of the waiver if they were still in effect.

“I still don’t like going inside a restaurant to eat,” she added. “And if they have an outdoor space, I’m going to choose that every time.” She said patio seating also added character to the town.

Councilor Mary Ellen O’Shaughnessey said the problem was that the brewery was taking parking in the lots of neighboring shops. Lambert replied that the code couldn’t be used to police parking on private property.

“This is a standard for parking before they started doing business and they knew what their standard was,” Lambert said. “This was an emergency Covid resolution.”

Anthony Muirhead, general manager of the Adobe Resort who attended the meeting remotely via Zoom, told the council that his and other businesses invested a lot of money building parking lots to comply with regulations, and he thought it was unfair to have special rules for a few businesses.

“This was always temporary, and I don’t see making it permanent and saying ‘Thanks for buying more land and more parking, but your neighbor doesn’t have to do that’ as fair.”

Mayor Craig Berdie said he’d received other comments about the fairness of the exception, but he was more inclined to see the city extend and then enforce the waiver’s conditions until a comprehensive parking plan is complete.

“There are clearly still people, health care providers for example, who do not want to eat inside still,” he said. “That’s not just a convenience issue, that’s very much their livelihood.”

Stott said she thought the council should let the waiver expire and allow code enforcement to move forward, then use a new parking management plan as a tool to work with violators.

Berdie asked if it was possible to approach the businesses “more softly,” with  conversation as opposed to a notification. He said he thought more outdoor seating rather than less was appealing for the town’s atmosphere.

O’Shaughnessey said atmosphere was good unless it meant taking parking from another business. Berdie said that was a private issue. Scott again said he thought the new parking available along U.S. Highway 101 should be reflected in the conversation.

Lambert said she was approaching it more from a standpoint of equal treatment of business owners rather than overall access to parking.

Muirhead said he thought the council would need a renewed pandemic emergency declaration to keep the waiver or public hearings on changing the rules.

Stott moved to allow the resolution to expire, winning agreement from three fellow councilors. Whitten-Carey voted no, saying she preferred they wait for the new parking plan before changing the status quo.

Pub clears off lot

Underground Pub owner Dave Lathrop had a large shipping container, porta-potty and stacked picnic tables in most of his parking lot for two years. Everything was cleaned out within the past two weeks, leaving six parking spaces to the west of a small outside seating area.

Yachats Brewing has been in its seasonal closure, which has stretched into March this year. The covered structure is still in part of its former parking area. Tables and chairs that were once in the other part of the parking area are stacked under the building awning.

“We’ve been operating with outdoor seating long before Covid and have a designated area that is registered as part of our license with the (Oregon Department of Agriculture),” brewery owner Bernard told YachatsNews last week. “And so we plan to continue to operate that area. I guess if the city wants to define more specifically what it is that they’re asking, then they can, but we didn’t really add anything as far as outdoor seating because of anything they did.”

Bernard added that the spaces in front of the brewery aren’t the only parking available to customers. He said the parking lot at the Yachats Cannabis Co. was also a brewery lot.

Bernard has been at odds with city and county officials off and on for almost 10 years. He started building the brewery addition onto a renovated bank in 2013 without obtaining the required building permits through the county planning department.

While the county is in charge of issuing permits, cities are responsible for dealing with violations within their borders. Yachats’s city attorney threatened to have the building posted as unsafe to occupy in 2017, but the city never took any further action. Tempers flared over the issue during a 2019 city council meeting which Bernard was asked to leave. In 2021, the Yachats Fire Department notified the city it would no longer enter the building in the event of a fire due to the lack of a certificate of occupancy, which requires a building permit.

The process has been plagued by lags in communication on all sides between Bernard, the planning department and the Eugene firm to which it contracts commercial permit review.

Bernard declined to comment on the status of the permit.

“I have clear evidence of my good faith efforts for 10 years now to comply with everything they’ve asked me to do,” Bernard said. “And they have not found a way to work with me or the architect or the attorney or anyone else that I’ve hired to deal with this process in the way they say they want.”

Onno Husing, the county’s director of planning, declined to update YachatsNews on the status of permits for Yachats Brewing, saying there was a new building official who was now working on the issue.

Bernard said despite the fact that the brewery has had outdoor seating since before the pandemic and has additional parking at the dispensary, he still expects a conflict with the city.

“We’re an easy target,” he said. “I guarantee you they are not going to just take, ‘We have plenty of parking spaces and here they are.’ They’re going to want something.”

• Kenneth Lipp is YachatsNews’ full-time reporter and can be reached at KenLipp@YachatsNews.com