Goleta Costco Relocates Handicapped Parking Spots

The weekend is a busy time at the Camino Real Marketplace in Goleta, especially where families of soccer players swarm between Girsh Park and the Costco parking lot. A few of them told the Independent that the handicapped parking spaces along Costco’s east wall were now painted white for regular parking. The blue-painted stalls were now on the other side of the traffic lanes. What gives? they asked.

While repeated calls to Costco in Goleta resulted in requests to contact management in Los Angeles, who did not respond, the Marketplace’s general property manager, Mark Ingalls, said he believed, “The new parking configuration is the result of a settlement that Costco agreed to, to retrofit some of its older stores.” The intent was to distribute the parking more evenly. “It now wraps around the whole front of the store,” Ingalls described, allowing handicapped drivers to access the store from the tire center to the front doors.

Back when the big-box mall was built and Costco became a tenant in 1998, placing handicapped parking where shoppers could simply exit their cars onto a sidewalk was thought to be safest. But disability requirements changed in the past 25 years, and about a half-dozen other Costco stores made the change, Ingalls said.

“Oh,” he added, “are you coming to the Lemon Festival? It’s going to be huge. The Sheriff’s department and Santa Barbara County Fire will be landing a helicopter and cutting up a car. Safety Town is really exploding this year.”

Be warned.