St. Joe Residents Fed Up With Silver Beach Traffic Issues

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silverbeach34

The city of St. Joseph is being urged by those who live below the bluff to put pressure on the Berrien County Parks Department to make changes at Silver Beach County Park to cut down on traffic congestion in the summer. The issue dominated the public comment portion of Monday night’s city commission meeting. June Bowman noted in her comments that their issues from past years with lines of cars waiting to get into the park jamming things up for hours haven’t gone away, even with new summertime traffic patterns.

“I feel like my freedom has been taken away on the weekends,” she told the commission. “For example, my daughter-in-law wanted to come down the other day and she got over here and said ‘forget it, we’ll do it later.’ That’s happened twice this year.”

She also said she was told she could not speak about the issues at a recent Berrien County Parks Commission meeting, which upset the city commissioners. Mayor Pro Tem Laura Goos said she’s sorry the issues haven’t cleared up even with the county now taking credit and debit cards for entry to the park instead of just cash or checks.

“That was the hope this year is that they had the machines and it would be (faster), but that’s not helping to the point where we wanted it to,” said Goos.

She adds she’d like to see the county switch from having someone manning the booth to a pay-by-license plate system like what the city has installed across the river at Tiscornia Park.

Mayor Mike Garey says they will take the issues raised to the county after city staff and the St. Joseph Public Safety Department meet this fall to discuss how the summer went.

“It only makes sense that if they (the Berrien County Parks Commission) are looking at improvements at Silver Beach, that we work with them on a better solution than we currently have.”

With each vehicle taking about 45 seconds to make a transaction to enter Silver Beach, once there are over 10 to 15 cars in line, the delay and traffic volume just keeps building.