COVID-19 Dining decks will come down in January
by Mark McDermott The Manhattan Beach outdoor dining deck experiment is coming to a close. Sort of. The City Council on Tuesday night unanimously agreed to require the downtown and North End restaurants to dismantle the temporary dining decks beginning January 3. But the Council also signaled a willingness to allow more permanent outdoor dining decks to take the place of the temporary structures. The decks were part of a larger Council-led effort, one that included utilizing not only sidewalks but for several months parts of Manhattan Avenue, to help restaurants survive pandemic restrictions which limited indoor dining. Those restrictions no longer exist. Mayor Pro Tem Steve Napolitano, who along with Councilperson Richard Montgomery was part of the council subcommittee that worked with the restaurants to find creative solutions during the height of the pandemic, said the time had simply come to live up to the “temporary” part of the agreement. He said going straight from temporary to permanent decks would not be fair to downtown residents who have been impacted most by the outdoor dining encroachment. “That wasn’t the commitment that was made to the folks downtown, who will be…
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