Westhampton Beach Village Board Exploring Paid Parking Options

There’s a popular misconception in Westhampton Beach during the summer months, fostered by drivers continuously circling Main Street as they search for a spot in front of their favorite restaurant, that there is a lack of available parking in the village.

The Main Street spots certainly fill up quickly on busy summer days and evenings. But village officials say they get frustrated when they hear complaints from visitors and locals alike that there is a lack of parking in Westhampton Beach.

They point to municipal lots behind Main Street businesses — particularly the lot behind the firehouse — that they say are seldom filled to capacity.

Perhaps it’s a matter of some visitors not being aware of the lots — Public Works Superintendent Matt Smith put up new signs this past summer pointing the way to the lots in an effort to make them more noticeable — or maybe it’s just a matter of preference, with some business district visitors preferring the Main Street spots and being reluctant to walk to their favorite shops and eateries.

It’s a puzzle that the Westhampton Beach Village Board has been trying to solve in recent years as they examine the number of spots available, the location of the municipal lots, and even whether the village should invest in more parking.

A traffic consultant, Ron Hill, was hired in 2023 to study all of that and come up with a parking study, just to survey the current trends. It gave officials a base to consider their options.

More recently, the board, including Mayor Ralph Urban, and with the help of Police Chief Steven McManus, who has taken an interest in the problem, have been discussing the possibility of implementing a paid parking program, similar to what the villages of Sag Harbor and East Hampton have done. The idea would be to require visitors to pay to park in the more popular lots as a way to push parking to the underutilized lots, which would offer free parking.

They’re early in the discussions. “I’m not too far into this yet,” McManus said. “I’m still waiting for feedback to come back from the company, and even if the village wants to implement it. It’s still in that phase of just kind of exploring what our options are.”

The board would not consider requiring drivers to park on Main Street at this time, Urban said, although a two-hour limit is currently strictly enforced. “Most of the board feels that paid parking on Main Street itself is probably not a good idea at this point,” he said, while noting that it could, potentially, be a consideration in the future.

Both East Hampton and Sag Harbor in recent years have contracted with ParkMobile, a firm that helps municipalities implement paid parking programs though its mobile phone application. Drivers register their cars and pay for parking through the app, instead of fishing for pocket change to feed a parking meter or running a credit card through a kiosk.

Both municipalities offer free parking for residents and only start charging nonresidents after a set time. For example, in East Hampton, the two lots where paid parking is implemented offer free parking for the first two hours, but $10 for the third. On Long Wharf, in Sag Harbor, parking is free for the first hour, then costs $4 for the second and third hours, $6 for the fourth hour, and $8 for the fifth hour.

The program has been fairly well-received in East Hampton, but some in Sag Harbor say the app can be difficult to use, particularly with a lack of Wi-Fi on the wharf. Sag Harbor officials continue to see parking in general as a major hurdle to overcome in the bustling village.

Urban cautioned that there is no plan yet in Westhampton Beach, and the idea of paid parking to help direct where people are parking in the village is just something the board is batting around — McManus is planning a presentation on possible options at the board’s work session next month on December 17 at 5 p.m. at Village Hall, but said he would be eager to know what the public thinks about the idea.

Part of the solution may also be directing where employees and store owners park, the mayor said.

“We did put in additional signage to additional parking, hoping that people would pay attention to it, and they don’t,” Urban said. “The parking lots, particularly the one behind the firehouse, which is a municipal lot, is underutilized, and even when Main Street is packed, there seems to be available spaces in that parking lot. So what we’re trying to do is get staff and employers and those kinds of people to park in that lot and relieve the parking on Main Street situation, but simply asking doesn’t seem to be working. People value their own convenience. I guess this is the best way to put it, and it’s just understandable to degree.”

If the village were to implement a paid program, Urban said, it would most likely be in the Parlato lot, the parking lot south of the business district along the canal. That would push parking to the firehouse lot, and even to the Village Marina, which usually has plenty of available spots for people willing to walk to the business district.

“That parking lot seems to be very crowded, especially at the dinner hour because of the restaurants in the area,” he said of the Parlato lot. “So it pushes people, if they don’t want to pay, they could go to the other lot. And you could push the employees to the firehouse lot. That’s what we’re trying to do, gently.”

The mayor also noted that there are a handful of privately owned parking lots — like the Walgreen’s lot and the Chase Bank lot, that people use as quasi-municipal lots. He said the village had been approached by a private company about the possibility of turning those lots into paid lots, a prospect that he said would be tricky if not impossible to accomplish. At the same time, he wondered what the effect of paid parking would have on those lots.

While the revenue the village might generate from a paid parking program might be an added bonus for the village, it’s certainly not the driver of the conversation, Urban said. At the same time, some of that revenue could eventually be used to add more parking lots to the village stable.

McManus said that revenue could also be used to offset parking fees new and expanding businesses pay as part of their building permit applications, often exorbitant fees that may hold back some business.

The chief said his interest was piqued as he saw some of the frustrations this summer — and became frustrated himself watching vendors in the village’s weekly farmers market on Mill Road take up prime spaces while the nearby municipal lot near the firehouse went underutilized.

“The farmers market is a great event that happens in the village,” he said. “It brings tons of people to the village and I love to see it and I love how it’s grown. But we have the public parking lot that’s almost across the street from there but all the vendors scramble to park on the street. I even sent a letter to the vendors through the chamber saying after you unload, can you park up there? And it was a voluntary request and I got no compliance.”

The chief said he was having conversations with ParkMobile, since that company was used by the other nearby villages and has a history out here. He also noted that the company works with the department and the village justice court for parking ticket payments, so it would be a smooth transition if paid parking was also implemented.

The only downside, the mayor said, would be that the technology might be difficult for older visitors.

“It does bother me that people that don’t have a cellphone or don’t have access to the internet will be at a disadvantage,” Urban said. “I’m not sure how many of those there are, but it’s a consideration.”

The mayor noted that the conversation would continue as the board seeks to shift where the public parks — as well as their misconceptions about a lack of parking overall.

“So we have a couple of underutilized parking lots we’d like to draw attention to,” he said, “and paid parking might be a way to do that. We don’t know yet.”