CAPE MAY — Dennis Crowley expressed frustration and concern over the slow progress and parking situation at Lafayette Street Park.
“Lafayette Street Park has been delayed time and time again for a variety of reasons and a litany of excuses for why it isn’t getting done,” he told City Council during a meeting Oct. 7. “The park was designed in phases and two or three of those phases are done.”
Installation of pickleball, basketball and tennis courts, along with a parking lot next to the new planned police station, are among the remaining items to complete.
Crowley, chairman of the city’s Municipal Taxation and Revenue Advisory Committee, asked council if the park is going to be ready by next Memorial Day.
“If it isn’t, we have escalated the problem that we have and that is we’re using a section of the park, which is supposed to be the surface level athletic installation, as a pop-up free parking lot,” he said.
During the summer, Crowley said there could be upward of 100 cars using the environmentally sensitive piece of land for free parking.
“It’s not paved, it’s not organized in any way — it’s just simply there,” he said. “If we do that next summer, we’re going to have two negative consequences: we’re going to be accustoming the visitors of this town to a free parking lot on Lafayette Street and we have deprived the residents and taxpayers of this town the facilities that we promised them.”
The city increased parking availability last summer, adding spots alongside the Clemans Theater for the Arts at the Allen AME Church, library branch and fire department on Franklin Street.
Crowley said the city has eight months to complete installation of the athletic courts prior to Memorial Day.
“We’re not going to be able to get the parking lot built, that’s going to be used to facilitate the heavy equipment for the police building,” he said. “I’m not sure why we can’t get the middle section of the park ready for Memorial Day.”
If the city continues to use the area for free parking next summer, Crowley added, it would be depriving the city of revenue it needs to help fund a parking solution.
“Free parking in Cape May is almost like heroin — once you get addicted to it, the harder it is getting off it,” Crowley said. “You could even put up a ParkMobile sign in there, that would be a solution.”
Mayor Zack Mullock said he has been open about his own disappointment with the progress of Lafayette Street Park.
“It’s been over a decade if not longer,” Mullock said. “It started with the remodeling of the playground that exists today — we did add this year ADA surfacing to the playground.”
Mullock added that the next phase of the park is in progress and is supposed to receive sod next week.
“The irrigation has been completed and they’re looking into opening the bocce ball court soon,” he said. “You’re going to see in the next 30 days, a nice grassy area for ball playing.”
The city had to break the project into parts, which required involving the Department of Environmental Protection, city and state historic preservation groups, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Board of Education, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Jersey Central Power & Light, among others.
“We had to break these things apart; it was a bowl of spaghetti that we had to literally unwind,” Mullock said. “The amount of people that were involved in this project were incredible and every single person took forever to get through the regulations and red tape. I’m not going to defend it, it was absurd.”
Mullock said the bottom line was that it took a long time to get through the process, and the city is currently waiting for an environmental permit.
“The hard courts are near the wetlands, and anything hard surface requires a CAFRA permit,” Mullock said. “The other thing that happened during this entire thing was some of the grants we had expired, so now we don’t want to build something without grants we know we can get.”
Mullock added that the grants would pay for 70 percent of the rest of the park, and that it is a waiting process for approval.
“The goal is — and it’s a very legitimate goal — that we start this process by this time next year and that’s the completion of the hard courts of the park,” Mullock said. “Every other aspect of the park, I do believe we will be able to start in the fall of 2026.”
Crowley asked if the area would still be a parking lot by summer. Mullock said it was most likely.
“Maybe the parking lot would start, [but] we have to work out how that would be a detail with the police station construction going on and whether we want to have a parking lot that might get beat up during that process,” Mullock said. “Next year we’ll have the new soccer field and the new dog park.”
Mullock said there will be parking issues in that area that need to be discussed further.
“The further number of years we misuse that piece of property based on its original intent, the harder it will be to explain why we let it go so long,” Crowley said.
By RACHEL SHUBIN/Special to the Star and Wave
