Milton council tables parking lot plans

Milton Town Council tabled plans for a new parking lot at the corner of Union and Magnolia streets to allow engineers to revise plans to include sidewalks.

The plans, presented by engineer Sharon Cruz of Davis, Bowen and Friedel at council’s April 7 meeting, included 39 parking spaces. Cruz said she was tasked with trying to maximize the number of parking spaces that could be included on the vacant lot next to the Lydia Cannon Museum. Cruz said there were challenges in coming up with the proposed plan, including that the parking lot is near a wetlands area. 

To make this plan happen, the town needed to get two waivers from town building code: the first was related to placement of a sidewalk along Magnolia Street, and the second was related to size requirements for individual parking spaces. Town code requires all new construction include curbs, gutters and sidewalks. However, code also carves out an exception where a waiver could be granted if placement of curbs, gutters and sidewalks cause an extraordinary hardship to the owner because of unusual topography, drainage, lot size or shape, street width, right-of-way width or other conditions that are not self-imposed.

In justifying the lack of sidewalk, Cruz said there is no sidewalk on that side of Magnolia Street currently, and plans include a connection from the parking lot to a handicapped-accessible ramp on Union Street and the opposite side of Magnolia Street. Cruz said installing a sidewalk would necessitate the removal of parking spaces from the plan to comply with code.

On the second waiver, Sussex Conservation District is requiring stormwater management. To get the amount of spaces the town wants, the parking space sizes must be varied. According to zoning code, a parking space in Milton must be a minimum of 10 feet by 20 feet for perpendicular parking, exclusive of parking aisles and driveways that would access the spaces.

Cruz’s plans included a 9-by-18-foot parking space, which would help maximize the parking and is in line with general parking space size throughout Sussex County. 

In an effort to create more parking downtown, the town acquired the land by entering into a 10-year lease in November with Milton Historical Society to use the vacant lot. 

Under terms of the lease, the town will pay $36,000 annually over the life of the lease, which would be for 10 years with an option to extend for five more years. Payments would be due by June 10 every year. The town will be responsible for installing the parking lot. In the past, the historical society had been reluctant to use that land for permanent parking, as the lot has had flooding problems. The town will also install signs for the lot. Mayor John Collier has said the town has commitments from Rep. Stell Parker Selby, D-Milton, and Sen. Russ Huxtable, D-Lewes, for $120,000 toward the cost of improvements at the lot.

Much of the concern about the plan came from Councilwoman Randi Meredith, who said, “The fact that the town is the one constructing this, and is not constructing a sidewalk, is just deeply offensive. It just seems like bad practice to do that without a sidewalk.”

She said the town’s comprehensive plan gives a lot of weight to improving handicap-accessibility and connecting sidewalks downtown to the surrounding neighborhoods. 

“If we were to give a sidewalk waiver, we’re just skipping these big sections of what the town is striving to do,” Meredith said.

Cruz said if sidewalks are added to plans, it would increase construction costs and decrease the amount of parking spaces. Meredith responded that the easier it is for people to walk around town, the more it will decrease the demand for parking.

Town Manager Kristy Rogers agreed with Cruz that if council wants a sidewalk, the plans can be changed to reflect that, but the town would not be maximizing parking spots at the lot. All told, installing a sidewalk would reduce the amount of spaces from 39 to 36. For Meredith, that was a tradeoff worth having.

Ultimately, Rogers and Collier steered council in the direction of tabling the matter to let Cruz rework the plans and present alternatives. Rogers said council coming to a decision in May would line up neatly with the first lease payment and with council making a final decision on an adjacent 2-acre parcel of land between Magnolia and Broad streets, meaning that with the leased land near Union Street, the town would essentially control that whole block.