Riverfront parking — Sebastian, Florida

Public parking on the Sebastian riverfront is spread among city sites on Indian River Drive: the Riverview Park parking area, the Cavcorp lot, the Yacht Club ramp lot at 820 Indian River Drive and the Main Street Boat Ramp.

The Yacht Club ramp is one of two boat launches run by the City of Sebastian. The city states that handicapped parking for trucks and trailers is available on site at 820 Indian River Drive, and that significant trailer parking is available just across the street at the city parking area in Riverview Park (City of Sebastian, Yacht Club).

The second launch, the Main Street Boat Ramp, sits at the intersection of Main Street and Indian River Drive, just east of U.S. Highway 1. The city lists trailer parking readily available at the ramp, along with restroom facilities, and gives the park address as 1300 Indian River Drive (City of Sebastian, Main Street Park).

The Cavcorp lot sits just north of Riverview Park, off Indian River Drive. The Sebastian CRA reports that paving, drainage and lighting of the Cavcorp parking lot was completed in December 2016 (Sebastian CRA projects). The same CRA list credits the agency with extra parking spaces along Indian River Drive, upgraded parking south of Riverview Park, and boat and car parking built with the Main Street realignment, all finished by mid 2016.

Rules for storing a boat or trailer at a Sebastian house, and the Chapter 98 ban on parking in drainage swales, are a separate subject from public riverfront parking and are covered on the Digital Towns page on boat and RV parking.

Sebastian CRA plans have described riverfront parking as short since at least 2010, when the plan update called public parking the most visible deficiency downtown on weekends and event days (2010 CRA plan, page 43).

The September 2010 update put the problem plainly: demand for parking facilities close to the riverfront typically exceeds current capacity at those peak times, and the city had been answering it by developing public parking facilities throughout the CRA (CRA plan update). Public input pointed at one stretch. The plan recorded community support for additional parking along the riverfront in the vicinity of Main Street to Riverview Park, and the plan recommended reconfiguring existing parking and modifying east-west streets between U.S. 1 and Indian River Drive to add on-street spaces (2010 CRA plan, page 26).

Money followed in the 2010 to 2015 capital program. It budgeted $30,000 for a parking study in 2011 and $400,000 in CRA funds for the C.A.V. Corp Parking Lot in 2012, with a note that the lot would also get $100,000 in Recreation Impact Fees and $250,000 from the DST Fund (2010 CRA plan, page 67). Added together, $400,000 plus $100,000 plus $250,000 comes to $750,000 planned for that one Indian River Drive lot.

The 2011 Riverfront Parking Study changed the diagnosis. According to the 2023 Sebastian CRA master plan, it evaluated four zones in the CRA and found a geographical mismatch between underutilized parking and popular destinations, as well as a lack of safety, accessibility and wayfinding to existing parking areas (2023 CRA plan, page 10). The Sebastian finding, in other words, was less about a missing total than about spaces sitting away from where riverfront visitors wanted to be, and about lots that were hard to find or reach on foot.

Under Section 54-3-15.4 of the Sebastian Land Development Code, a commercial property in the Commercial Riverfront or Commercial Waterfront Residential district inside the CRA may pay a per-space fee into the riverfront parking trust fund instead of building required spaces (Sebastian LDC).

The option opens when a riverfront project triggers the parking rules: an increase in the floor area of an existing building, a new building with greater floor area, or a change to the approved uses in an existing building. Fees are set per space, based on the city's cost of designing and building a parking space, plus land costs if the city buys land for public parking, and they are adopted and amended by the Sebastian City Council by resolution (Section 54-3-15.4).

The money is fenced. The code says the trust fund may be used only to develop and maintain public parking within the community redevelopment area east of the Florida East Coast railroad tracks (Sebastian LDC). A business that pays gets no parking of its own: spaces in the program are not assigned or reserved, and the city keeps all rights to advertising and signs on them.

The going rate is recorded in the 2023 Sebastian CRA master plan, which says the parking-in-lieu program provides for establishing parking within the right-of-way at $3,200 per space (2023 CRA plan, page 56). That figure is dated to the 2023 plan; a later council resolution changing it was not found. At that rate, the 30-space cap per development works out to 30 times $3,200, or $96,000.

The program grew out of a single Indian River Drive building. The CRA's economic development account says that in 2010 a bank foreclosed on a waterfront restaurant property, the buyers wanted more seating than the lot could park, and the CRA and Economic Development departments proposed payment in lieu of parking using adjacent city parking areas (Sebastian CRA). The modified regulations were approved by late August 2010, and Ordinance O-10-05, adopted September 22, 2010, rewrote the city parking article (Municode history note). The 2023 plan adds that the 2011 parking study resulted in the parking-in-lieu program for parking within the right-of-way of the business district (2023 CRA plan, page 47).

Sebastian sets required spaces by use in Section 54-3-15.2, and a sit-down restaurant on Indian River Drive needs one and one-half spaces for each 100 square feet of gross floor area, outdoor customer areas included (Sebastian LDC).

The marina line carries extra counts: one space for each transient live-aboard slip, one for every two wet slips and one for every four dry slips, and charter and party boats are counted by Coast Guard licensed capacity (Section 54-3-15.2). Those counts apply to marina, charter and rental uses in the Sebastian riverfront districts as well as to restaurants.

The arithmetic shows why the trust fund exists. A riverfront dining room and deck totaling 2,000 square feet of customer area, kitchen excluded, needs 2,000 divided by 100, times 1.5, or 30 spaces under the Sebastian ratio. That equals the full 30-space trust fund cap, so a restaurant of that size could in principle meet its entire requirement through the fund rather than paving land beside the lagoon.

A second route is off-site parking. For nonresidential uses, the code allows spaces on another site no more than 500 feet away, measured property line to property line, and no more than 50% of the required spaces may be off site (Section 54-3-15.4). The two sites may not be separated by a major collector, a road of more than two lanes or a railroad right-of-way, so a lot on the far side of the Florida East Coast tracks cannot serve a riverfront business this way, and a recorded cross access agreement approved by the city attorney is required.

Further reliefs apply anywhere in Sebastian. The planning and zoning commission may cut the requirement for a historic structure by one space or ten percent, whichever is greater, the same maximum cut may be permitted to save specimen or historic trees, and two businesses whose hours do not overlap may share one lot under a joint use document (Sebastian LDC). The 2010 CRA plan notes that the redevelopment area includes all of the Old Town Sebastian Historic District (2010 CRA plan), so the historic-structure relief can apply on the riverfront.

The Sebastian CRA has rebuilt riverfront parking piece by piece since 2010, and its 2023 master plan still lists on-street and off-street parking as a program for the redevelopment area (2023 CRA plan).

The Cavcorp lot shows how parking and the lagoon are tied together. The 2014 Riverfront Drainage Study named the CavCorp parking lot among the stormwater problem areas, and the 2023 plan reports those improvements were completed in 2017 through baffle boxes installed at major outfall locations (2023 CRA plan, page 54). The plan separately lists completed repairs to the CavCorp boat parking property among the agency's accomplishments since 1995 (2023 CRA plan, page 47).

The 2023 plan also explains what the 2010 code change was for. It states that the Land Development Code was updated under Ordinance No. O-10-05 to encourage public parking use in high-demand, low-supply areas, and that the Agency envisions increasing public parking in the CRA and adding on-street parking and streetscapes next to recreation areas (Sebastian CRA master plan). Its program matrix marks on-street and off-street parking for three of the plan's five conceptual planning districts (2023 CRA plan, page 56).

The CRA projects page, which describes work up to mid 2016, lists additional parking along Indian River Drive among projects then in the final stages of planning or execution, alongside directional signs within the CRA (Sebastian CRA projects). That page has not been updated with completion dates for those items, so their status is not stated here. Last verified: October 12, 2026, on the City of Sebastian website.