Oak Park will consider tightening its rules regarding outdoor dining at restaurants later this month.
“We’re bringing this forward in anticipation of seeing it adopted before the weather turns,” said Village Manager Cara Pavlicek.
The proposed ordinance would require restaurants to pay an annual permit fee of $50 plus 50 cents per square foot of sidewalk space used for outdoor dining. In order to be issued a permit by the village, a restaurant would need to allow the directors from public works and public health to inspect and sign off on the dining area to make sure it doesn’t “unreasonably interfere with pedestrian or vehicular traffic” and that the area is “in accordance with applicable food service sanitation regulations.”
Furniture in the outdoor dining area must also meet specific regulations. For instance, furniture must “aesthetically compliment the [restaurant’s] property,” not be out of character with the rest of the business district and umbrellas must not “contain or display any type of message, symbol, logo or signage.”
As for canopies, the draft of the ordinance read at Monday’s meeting allowed them only if their use was “incidental to the operation of a club, hotel, motel, restaurant, apartment or condominium development on private contiguous property.” Canopy permits would cost an additional $20 per year.
“Obviously, the policy rationale for the fencing requirement is that you want you make sure that random repositioning doesn’t occur. So that what you approve doesn’t end up turning into something else,” said Village Board member Adam Salzman
Tammie Grossman, the village’s development customer services director, said the village’s engineering department would be working to come up with best practices on how to secure the fencing. They’d need to take it on a case-by-case basis, she said, because of the different types of sidewalks within the village and types of fences that can be used.
Regardless, Salzman thought the current wording was too broad and would rather the village used specific guidelines on how to handle it. Meanwhile, Trustee Colette Lueck wanted to know why the village was considering this and preferred to have more data to support the ordinance.
“It is based on complaints,” said Grossman. “So what will happen is sometimes we’ll say you can have your outdoor dining at this level, but they’ll move the fence. Or there’s a tree pit that’s requiring someone to maneuver around it or they bring additional items outside and put it outside the dining area. So we did get a number of complaints this year on outdoor dining.”
The Village Board is expected to vote on the proposed measure at their March 16 meeting.