Pickleball players like Heidi Moller, at the Palisades Tennis Courts in Shell Beach, say all 12 spots at both nearby parking lots are snatched up early every day.
“There is a lot of people that play. Sometimes we have 60 people playing on the court, or at least sitting and watching. It's a very social game,” Moller said.
Many live close by and bike to the courts as a warm-up, but others, like Jannett Declark who lives farther away, face the stress of finding parking.
”I do wonder if I'm going to get a parking space. I can walk over from Hermosa, but it's hard for a lot of people and it's dangerous crossing as well. There's no crosswalk," Declark says.
Throughout the years, they’ve come up with ways to make the limited number of parking spaces available, work.
“We would pull in and park, and then people would essentially double park and block them in," explained pickleball player Kent Tracy. "We have a system. Then somebody would whistle and say, 'hey, move your car', or [since] we all know each other well enough, they would move our cars for us if we were playing."
But increased police presence has hindered their “symbiotic, illegal situation,” as Tracy called it.
“It has been put on the desk of the police department to monitor and come by and issue tickets, which they do on a regular basis,” Tracy said.
I brought their concerns to the City of Pismo Beach and found out that a project is in the works to alleviate the parking problem in the area.
The Palisades Sports Courts Restroom/Parking project is still in the design phase and city officials say details regarding additional parking spaces are pending, but they anticipate finalizing the project's design in the upcoming fiscal year.
"We like hope. We’re hopeful,” Tracy says.
