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Dear Editor,
Worldwide, affordable housing is difficult to find. It’s no different here in Ludington. Many employees, those workers who keep our businesses open and thriving during the busy summer season, have to live outside the boundaries of Ludington proper to find affordable housing. This means they live north of Bryant, south of Sixth Street, and with a few exceptions, east of Sherman. These are the people who, while their property taxes don’t go to the city, help support the entire structure of this tourist town.
According to the Stearns Beach pay schedule proposed at the recent Parks and Recreation Committee meeting, all those residents would pay at least a suggested early bird special of $50 for an annual parking pass to the beach, or $75 a year if the pass isn’t purchased by mid-April.
Disregarding snowplowing through the outer drive, the city spends about $283,000 annually to maintain Stearns Park and the beachfront. Certainly, this is a chunk of money, and certainly, paid parking is not an unreasonable proposal.
Some other communities have chosen to enact parking fees at their beaches. Pentwater, Holland and Grand Haven have state park beaches, and those are accessed with daily rates or the annual fee of $15 sent in with your license plate renewal. The annual pass at Tunnel Park in Holland costs $25, or $15 for all Ottawa County residents, dropping to $9 a year for seniors and veterans. The Muskegon city beach pass is $40 a year and covers four beaches. Wednesdays are free. City residents get two free passes. The city of Grand Haven has maintained free parking at its city beach.
Questions arose at the committee meeting regarding the cost of enacting such a program. There will be set costs for staff, both at the beach for enforcement and for time spent at City Hall handing out passes, and for the kiosks that will be purchased and installed along the outer drive. Those numbers have all been crunched to the best of anyone’s ability, given that this is new for the city. It was suggested that, in the best-case scenario, the city would recover its costs in half a year.
I have two comments regarding that. One is, we aren’t reinventing the wheel; there are communities along the lakeshore that have done this, and logical comparisons can be made. The other is, never in my experience have I been involved in enacting a new program with startup costs where those costs have been recovered in such a short time.
I have the feeling this is being rushed. The dates of the proposal are, in my opinion, lengthy. Why not simply June 1 to Labor Day? Why 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.? When the times were discussed, it was, again in my opinion, cavalierly tossed off that sunsets in the summer were at 10 p.m. No. The sunset this past June 21 was at 9:32 p.m. Sunset Aug. 8 was at 9 p.m.
Like the misbegotten and abandoned streetlight assessment, I feel the city is grasping at straws to try to balance the budget. If that’s the case, let’s first figure out why there is such an imbalance. Let’s not just hang a sudden, excessive new cost on residents without finding the underlying problem. Is it streetlights? Is it parking? Is it a little bit of several items? The vast majority of us live in Ludington and Mason County because we love it. I believe we can solve this problem in a reasonable manner.
Sincerely,
Deb Del Zoppo
Pere Marquette Township
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