Outdoor Dining Parklets To Reopen In Manhattan Beach This Week

MANHATTAN BEACH, CA — Outdoor dining public parklets in Manhattan Beach will reopen this Wednesday, Jan. 27, according to Manhattan Beach City Council member Steve Napolitano, who sits on the council's Long Term Business Solutions Ad Hoc Committee. The public parklets will have "stronger rules and oversight to better ensure public safety for everyone," Napolitano told Manhattan Beach Patch.

The parklets were closed by the ad hoc committee three weeks ago at 10 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 3 as COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations increased across Los Angeles County. The public outdoor dining decks were a workaround approved by the ad hoc committee in early December shortly after LA County issued an order to ban all outdoor restaurant dining the evening before Thanksgiving in response to pleas from downtown Manhattan Beach restaurant owners to provide them with more seating so they could accommodate more diners and increase sales beyond what just take-out orders would give them.

Manhattan Beach Mayor Suzanne Hadley, at the Tuesday night city council meeting following the closure, said of the decision to close outdoor dining parklets, "Was I shocked? Yes. My jaw hit the floor." Both the mayor and council member Joe Franklin pushed to allow outdoor dining every chance they had. Napolitano said then, he wanted to wait to reopen until it was safe to do so and called the closure a "common sense precaution" that was "about reducing risk to the greatest extent possible."

Last week, Napolitano and fellow ad hoc council member Richard Montgomery held a meeting "as we saw the infection rates and hospitalizations going down. As a result, we made the decision to reopen the public seating this week... It was a very collaborative effort, with input and buy-in from our business organizations and restaurant representatives."

Napolitano, who said that "Today, that downward trend has been confirmed by LA County and we heard last night that the Governor was going to lift his stay-at-home order," also noted "What that means for LA County and outdoor dining is not clear yet, as the county would have to issue a new order allowing outdoor dining to resume.

"If our City efforts are preempted by such a change, then all the better. We've made the argument before that outdoor dining is preferable to outside seating because restaurants can better regulate them and it's a much more controlled environment. So our fingers are crossed that they'll reopen outside dining, but if they don't then our plan to safely reopen outdoor seating will move forward."

Said Manhattan Beach Mayor Hadley when asked about outdoor dining and before Manhattan Beach Patch was told the city's outdoor dining parklets would reopen this week, "Our LA County cases are plummeting, thank goodness. You may know that the LA County Dept of Sanitation monitors sewage for Covid virus 'shedding.' In a Sanitation meeting I was in last Friday, they showed a line graph indicating virus levels in county wastewater have returned to levels last seen in mid-Nov back when outdoor dining was allowed and salons were open. So that's really good news county-wide."

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