THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, March 17, 1995 TAG: 9503160174
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 14 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL REED, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines
Daily trash pickups and permit requirements for Oceanfront bars - two issues of vital concern to resort businesses - are about to come to a head.
First, the city wants to get out of the commercial trash haul business because of the expense and manpower involved.
Many Oceanfront business operators - especially those who have had their trash picked up daily by city trucks - want to stay with the city service, because it is reliable and clean.
A questionnaire circulated by the city last week along the resort strip queried business operators about (1) granting a trash collection franchise to a single private hauler or (2) allowing individual businesses to negotiate their own private deals.
A city-operated trash pickup was not an option in the survey, said Ralph Smith, director of the city's Public Works Department.
Survey results should be compiled within the next week, Smith said, and the information passed on to the City Council for a decision by the end of March.
The trash collection question has gone unanswered for a month while the city and Oceanfront merchants have tried to determine who would make daily refuse collections - private or municipal haulers.
The city now hauls trash from 190 of the resort area's businesses seven days a week in the summer. The service is reduced to four days a week in the winter. Hotels, restaurants and shops are charged fees based on the number of trash containers to be emptied.
No matter which way the council decides, the expense for individual merchants will go up sharply, Smith predicted.
Meanwhile, Oceanfront business organizations have endorsed a move to require a city use permit to open new resort strip bars. Last week the Planning Commission unanimously backed the plan.
Their recommendation will be forwarded to the City Council for a decision by the end of the month. The council has the final say in granting or denying use permits, but the current zoning ordinance does not cover the resort district, which is zoned differently than other businesses citywide.
Basically the code change would include the resort area in requiring a use permit to operate any eating or drinking establishment that serves alcohol, operates between midnight and 2 a.m. and excludes minors.
A second part of the proposed code change includes a list of terms that would-be bar operators must agree to before the city would grant use permits. These include noise, litter and traffic control, and provisions for overflow parking. Business operators also would be asked to control loitering and crowds outside their establishments, especially in parking lots.
The city has the right to attach additional conditions that must be met by prospective permit applicants.
``This doesn't prohibit these kinds of establishments,'' said Planning Commissioner Robert H. Vakos, who also owns an Oceanfront hotel. ``But it gives the city more leeway in controlling them.''
Vakos said the permit plan was spurred by the sudden proliferation of bar-restaurants on Atlantic Avenue and its side streets, especially in the area of 19th and 20th streets, where at least 10 bar-restaurants have sprung up in the last five to 10 years. by CNB