OCEAN CITY – Resort officials this week signed off on a lease renewal for parking spaces on town-owned property for an uptown restaurant and bar.
The Mayor and Council had before them on Tuesday a request from the original Greene Turtle at 116th Street to renew a five-year lease for 10 parking spaces and an additional space for storage.
The Greene Turtle has leased the 10 spaces near the town’s wastewater pumping station at Jamestown Road, along with another space that is equivalent in size to a parking space, but is used for storage by the establishment.
The current lease is $4,000 per year, but expires on June 30. City Manager Terry McGean explained the town and the Greene Turtle have worked out a renewed lease agreement for another five years, but the agreement needed approval from the council.
The town in the past has leased spaces to other establishments in the midtown area in the parking lot of the Public Safety Building. McGean explained those parking space lease agreements were a little different then the agreement with the Greene Turtle.
“The city leased the parking spaces at the Public Safety Building to Skye Bar and Dead Freddies for $453 per space,” he said. “However, in that case, the parking spaces existed, and the lessees did not need to invest any money to build the lot. In the Greene Turtle case, they constructed the parking lot behind the pump station, which they state was $50,000.”
For that reason, the staff was recommending a $50 per space reduction for the Greene Turtle to account for the establishment’s upfront costs. As a result, the lease for the Greene Turtle presented on Tuesday was at a rate of $403 per space for the 10 parking spaces and the additional equivalent space used for storage, for a total of $4,433 per year for the five-year term.
McGean said that 11th space, which at 11 feet by 33 feet is the equivalent of an additional parking space, was counted in the equation when the town learned the area was owned by the city but utilized by the establishment for storage.
“What happened was, they put storage units in that space,” he said. “We learned the storage units were on our property and we assigned a value to it equal to the other parking spaces in the lease agreement.”
With little other discussion, the council voted 4-0, with Council President Matt James and Councilmen Lloyd Martin and Peter Buas absent, to approve the lease renewal under the new terms.
