THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 14, 1994 TAG: 9408120227
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Bill Reed
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines
Let's tell it like it is.
The expanded parking restrictions in some oceanfront neighborhoods was rushed through the City Council last week as a step toward restoring law and order on the resort strip.
Pure and simple.
The official line is that it was meant to keep those residential streets open to emergency vehicles, i.e. police cars, fire trucks and ambulances and to preserve on-street parking for residents.
While these aims have merit, they actually are window dressing.
It is really a matter of keeping the streets along the resort oceanfront safe from marauding punks - especially before the upcoming Labor Day weekend festivities - that lies behind the measure adopted unanimously by the council on Tuesday.
So, what's wrong with that, you ask.
Absolutely nothing.
Leaders in this community have a moral obligation to see that its citizens and the tourists who visit local beaches, shops, inns and eateries are free from the kind of intimidation and harassment that have cropped up along parts of the oceanfront in recent years.
Arguments that racial insensitivity among resort business owners and a lack of activities to occupy teens have created most of these problems do not, under any circumstances, justify allowing city streets to succumb to anarchy.
There is an important third party involved here: the citizens of Virginia Beach. They are the people who pay the bills for all city operations.
They need to be considered first and forthrightly in any deliberations over public safety. They need to be assured that something concrete is being done.
Timid, politically correct tiptoeing around the issue is counterproductive.
It can be made perfectly clear, without plunging into Gestapo tactics, that everybody who visits the resort area must abide by the rules of civilized behavior. No exceptions. Firmness and fairness are not impossible nor mutually exclusive concepts.
In making a move in this direction, council members sucked up their courage and voted to expand restricted parking to include an 80-block area encompassed by Laskin Road to the north, Norfolk Avenue to the south, Parks Avenue to the west and Pacific Avenue to the east.
Basically, the program bans on-street parking for non-residents of the area between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. daily, year-round.
The idea is to keep out late-night troublemakers who have, for the past five or six years, parked free in these neighborhoods and filtered into the resort strip.
Many of them have made life miserable for residents and business owners on these same streets by staying by their cars and partying all night long. In the process, neighborhood yards have been trashed and curbside revelers have played car radios at full volume, urinated in residential shrubbery and menaced householders who complained about their behavior.
The expanded parking restrictions have created the expected brouhaha within the affected neighborhoods.
Opponents object to the speed with which the provisions were rammed through by the council and to the inconvenience of obtaining residential parking decals for themselves and guest passes for nighttime visitors, although they will be free of charge until Jan. 1.
Proponents welcome a nighttime ban on on-street parking for non-residents. They argue that it will rid their neighborhoods of a lot of nocturnal headaches.
They are ready for some peace and quiet - and rightly so.
KEYWORDS: VIRGINIA BEACH CITY COUNCIL PARKING
by CNB