Village Introduces Parking Fee For New Or Expanding Businesses

The Patchogue Village Board of Trustees approved a measure that will charge restaurant and catering companies for the parking spots they are required to provide.

The program, called PILOP, or Payment In Lieu Of Parking, will only apply to new restaurants, catering halls or establishments the Planning Board might consider eateries that move into the D-3 zone, a chunk of square mileage from Oak Street to Church Street and along Main Street from Railroad Avenue to Rider Avenue. The fee will not apply to existing restaurants in the zone until or unless the existing restaurant decides to expand or increase its square footage. Retail stores are exempt from the PILOP program.

Essentially, as it was explained by Trustee Lori Devlin, new or expanding eateries are purchasing “virtual parking spaces,” meaning that the spaces may not yet exist, but the fee paid to the village will help village leaders acquire property, build lots, and maintain spaces in the future. The village board believes that the PILOP payments in conjunction with the new meters ready to be installed in Patchogue, will help generate the necessary cash to purchase land and develop municipal parking. Jack Krieger, acting as Deputy Mayor in Mayor Paul Pontieri’s absence from Monday night’s meeting, said the fees are targeting eateries because patrons of those establishments, as well as employees, tie up parking spaces for longer swaths of time than retail.

Village Attorney Brian Egan explained the program to a vocal few who turned out at the board meeting armed with questions. Using a 3,000 square foot example, Egan said that a business is required to provide one parking space for every 100 square feet of space, which would require the business in the example to have 30 spaces. The village will apply a “retail credit” number of spaces that the business above would not have to pay for, in line with the zero fee for retail provision. In the example above, that would be 20 spaces. The 10 spaces that remain as a requirement for that 3,000-square-foot eatery would be taxed with the PILOP fee of $1,500 per space. That means the eatery in Egan’s example would pay a one-time fee of $15,000 to the village.

The formula would follow a number of steps:

• New business comes in, or existing business applies for permits to expand

• Planning Board determines the business is an eatery

The measure passed with one lone dissent from Trustee Thomas Ferb, who said he wanted to see how the village’s parking meter initiative panned out. “I think we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here,” he said.

The village said the average municipal cost for each public parking space created is around $13,000 per space. When residents suggested the board look into tiered parking, the board acknowledged that they have and will continue to look into that possibility, but that the number being quoted back to them, per space is $30,000 for tiered parking.

Attorney Egan said other municipalities have enacted a similar PILOP program. Those include the villages of East Hampton, Huntington and Valley Stream and the City of Glen Cove.