Winter Park City Commission considers more parking at MLK Jr. Park

Winter Park may add more parking near Martin Luther King Jr. Park as a response to the park’s growing popularity and influx of visitors.

City Commissioners were presented with two potential options at their Dec. 10 meeting to install parking along Comstock Avenue within city right-of-way, which would correspond to the existing parking lot on the north side of the street next to the Rollins College softball stadium.

The first option is to position the parking spaces perpendicular to the curb, yielding 65 spaces. A second option would place the spaces at a 60-degree angle, creating 59 spaces.

It’s slower and a little more difficult to park in the perpendicular parking versus the angled parking, but it provides the most spaces, according to city staff.

Either option would cost the city about $150,000 and would involve forming an agreement with the incoming Verax medical site currently under development to the south. The project would encroach on that property by two or three feet.

“Before we went to final design, I wanted to just lay it out and see if there’s interest in exploring it further to get to a more final design,” Public Works Director Troy Attaway said.

City Commissioner Pete Weldon said it may make more sense for the item to go before the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency Board, because that pulls from funds that are more readily available.

“I wanted to bring up the possibility of considering this at a CRA meeting, where it can be funded from more flexible dollars, if you will,” Weldon said. “I’d like to keep as much as we have in the general fund, because those dollars are not as generously available as are the CRA monies going forward.”

City Commissioner Carolyn Cooper supported that idea as well and said she would like to see how added parking along Comstock could affect the need for parking at the proposed library and events center set for the northwest corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Park.

“I would like to look at this versus the parking garage to support the library and event center and perhaps the rooftop venue,” she said.

The City Commission ultimately decided to pass the matter to the CRA Board, with a meeting set for early next year.

Henderson Hotel 

City Commissioners also heard from an applicant who is considering building a boutique hotel just south of the Hillstone restaurant along U.S. 17-92.

The Henderson Hotel project would involve numerous variances and encroachment on city roads, and City Manager Randy Knight said the applicant has requested a workshop in the hopes of gauging the city’s appetite for such a project.

The location of the hotel is the block south of Beachview Avenue, east of Killarney Drive, west of U.S. 17-92 and north of Fairview Avenue.

“Before they get into the high cost of design — their plans call for some use of city right-of-way — they have requested a work session with the City Commission just to see if there’s any interest at all in the city participating,” Knight said. 

The new hotel on Lake Killarney could include a parking garage and retail space. City Commissioners agreed to have a workshop before one of their January meetings.