Harbor Plan Calls for New Parking Fee : Dana Point: Visitors without validations would pay $1 for every 30 minutes.

Eileen Navarro nearly choked on her Harpoon Henry’s lunch when she heard that the free parking she has enjoyed for 19 years at Dana Point Harbor could cost as much as $18 a day by spring.

“I was shocked,” said Navarro, 40, a Dana Point resident since 1974. “Isn’t anything free anymore?”

Dana Point Harbor, which has offered free parking since it opened in 1972, soon could go the way of most other Southern California harbors and charge for parking at three of its most popular lots at the harbor entrance.

A plan for paid parking and mechanical entry gates during the summer and peak weekend hours cleared an important first hurdle when the county Harbors, Beaches and Parks Commission approved it last week. Several other agencies, including the County Board of Supervisors, will now examine the proposal.

Local residents and harbor visitors should be prepared for a parking program like those in other coastal areas, said Rich Adler, a senior planner for the county’s division of harbors, beaches and parks.

“There are already parking controls in Newport Beach, Long Beach and San Diego,” Adler said. “I’ve never seen other places in this urban area where you don’t pay to park along the shoreline. It just doesn’t happen.”

As envisioned in the new Dana Point Harbor plan, 781 parking spaces that are now free in the Mariners Village and Dana Wharf areas will be gated. One block of 124 spaces will be reserved for harbor businesses’ employees, with the others held for visitors, who will get free parking with a validation or pay $1 for every 30 minutes, up to a maximum of $18.

Boat owners with harbor slips, who already have private parking, would not be affected.

Supporters of the plan, including the business owners who hold the master leases for the harbor commercial spaces, as well as county planners, point out that most of the harbor’s 1,623 spaces will remain free.

The plan singles out the parking lots near the harbor’s most crowded shopping and eating areas, where many visitors park all day--clogging the lots but not spending money at the businesses.

“It’s not like we are taking away the free parking from the public who wants to come down and get a cup of coffee and get their purchase validated,” Adler said. “But parking is a tough situation down there, and we are trying to make a tough situation better.”

Harbor business owners have hounded the county for years to solve the parking problem, said Bob Mardian, a harbor tenant since 1972 and owner of the Wind & Sea restaurant and Harpoon Henry’s.

“I’ve been going on and on about this for the last 15 years,” Mardian said. “It’s an unbelievable problem, absolutely intolerable. We recognized it years ago and nothing--zero--has been done.”

Mardian said he has seen too many customers drop off members of their party at the restaurant door and drive off in search of parking, only to return hopping mad because they could not find a space.

“Lots of times they will be so mad they’ll drag their friends away from the waiting area and refuse to eat here,” he said.

The thought of those unhappy customers--not to mention frustrated business owners--prompted the Dana Point Harbor Assn. and the county to subsidize at least four parking studies over the years, said Ralph Davidson, the association president.

“In the busiest times, which is in the summertime weekends and on the major holidays, we have no idea how much business the parking problems drive away,” said Davidson, a Villa Park resident who has run the harbor fuel dock for seven years. “There are times when the county has to set up blockades and just direct people out of the harbor, it gets so bad.”

But residents like Navarro and others claim that mechanical gates and fees are not the answer.

“I think it would be a crime,” said Lou Monson of Laguna Niguel, who visited the harbor Wednesday to get a cup of ice cream. “There are too many guard gates in this county as it is. They just need to build more parking.”

Dana Point resident Roxanne McIntyre agrees.

“I don’t like the idea,” said McIntyre, who has lived in Dana Point for six years. “I probably wouldn’t come down here as much” if parking was not free.

Each parking study has come up with the same recommendation: build a $4-million, two-story parking structure. But each time, that solution has also led to a standoff between the business owners and the county.

Business owners are willing to ante up the money to build the structure, but only in exchange for extending their rapidly expiring 30-year leases, all set to run out in 2001. So far, the county is not interested in granting any lease extensions, instead preferring to review the leases in the near future, Adler said.

“That’s not a practical solution right now,” he said. “This plan is one way with limited expenditures to alter the situation. This is only an interim solution.”

Under the proposal, the owners of the two lucrative master leases next to the affected parking--Gary Bushman of Mariners Village and Morris Harrison of the Dana Wharf area--will pay to install the mechanical gates in the three lots, estimated to cost $167,000, Adler said. Neither Bushman nor Harrison could be reached for comment.

In return, they would have an agreement with Ace Parking of San Diego to share the returns to cover their costs, Adler said. Any profits will be split 50-50 between the county and the master lease holders, although little profit is anticipated, Adler said.

“Parking studies show that 60% of the patrons in these complexes will get validations,” he said. “People will go out to dinner, maybe decide to walk around for a while, and pay an extra dollar. If there is any profit, we will split it, but we are not encouraging this as a profit-making situation in any respect.”

It is those patrons looking for validations that Mardian and other business owners want to accommodate. “Poachers”--the people who leave their cars in the harbor parking lots and then jump the fence to Doheny State Beach or spend all day on pleasure boats--should park in free lots elsewhere, Mardian said.

“We want the commercial public, the shopping public, to understand they won’t have to pay,” Mardian said. “My customers will never pay. It is the death knell for a restaurant to make their customers pay.”

Paid, controlled parking is being offered only as a last resort, Davidson said. Off-site tram parking has been tried, but it does not seem to work, he said.

“Shuttles just don’t work,” Davidson said. “For some reason, if Southern Californians can’t get parking nearby, they are just not going to do business there.”

Plans to Charge for Parking Visitor lots affected by proposal With Validation Restaurants: Two hours of free parking*Shops: One hour of free parking* Dana Wharf: Four hours of free parking**with purchase No Validation o-15 minutes: Free Each half-hour: $1 Daily maximum: $18