Beaches Belong to All--Even in Huntington Beach

Last Tuesday, when temperatures soared over the 100-degree mark, the Huntington Beach City Council took an action that will make beachgoing more prohibitive for many residents: It slapped a $2 surcharge on the parking fee at city beaches.

That means that starting May 1, anyone using the municipal parking lots at the beach will have to pay a single-day parking fee of $6. The fee was levied to raise money to help rebuild the Huntington Beach pier that was badly damaged in last year’s storms.

At the same session, the City Council reduced the cost of annual parking passes for residents from $40 to $30.

There are a couple of things wrong with those seemingly contradictory actions. If the city is so intent on raising money for the pier’s reconstruction by increasing beach parking fees, why didn’t it raise the rate for the residents’ annual parking passes too? Or at least leave the residents’ fee at the same level?

The fact that Huntington Beach city officials noted that about 85% of people using city beaches last year were non-residents indicates their obvious intent to give local inhabitants a break and sock it to the out-of-towners.

In the process, however, the city is also socking it to a lot of people who cannot afford costly entertainment and look forward to an outing at the beach as an inexpensive form of recreation. The $6 parking fee is high enough to lift more than occasional beachgoing out of their price range and make frequent attendance prohibitive.

We recognize that the influx of thousands of non-residents puts a strain on coastal communities, clogging local streets with traffic and requiring more money to be spent for certain city services, like police and road maintenance. But that is balanced out by the economic advantages of tourism that a coastal location provides, as well as the convenience and pleasure seaside residents enjoy living close to the beach.

At times some residents and officials forget that the public beaches belong to everyone and that people from Costa Mesa and Corona have as much right to use them as they do.

Coastal communities cannot put up fences to keep non-residents out. Charging exorbitant parking fees that limit public access to the beach amounts to the same thing.