CAPE CORAL, Fla. — Car washes are easy to find in Cape Coral and our City Council is putting a stop to new car washes from coming to the city.
Cape Coral Community Correspondent Bella Line was in the meeting on Wednesday where they started to do some fine-tuning on what exactly that means.
"It seems like every corner that we drive on, there's car wash or going to be a car wash there," said Charles Lewis, who lives in Cape Coral.
The city says they've noticed it too. Watch the full report below.
"You see it on social media people saying there are too many car washes in Cape Coral, right, and so that is the reason that council initially said we need to put a moratorium," said Melissa Mickey, Communication Manager for the city.
Mickey spoke with Fox 4's Bella Line after the council discussed long-term options for the moratorium. As of now, the moratorium puts a pause on new car washes and is set to end in January of 2025.
"The reason that we put this moratorium in place in the first place, and for only one year, so the current city code may not actually be equipped to manage the rapid rise of car washes in Cape Coral," said Mickey. "This moratorium gives staff the time to study and find out some good solutions."
The council was given three options for how to stop the boom of car washes in the city long term.
"You know, that's why we're having this discussion because they're popping up all over the place," said John Gunter, Mayor of Cape Coral. "You can have one within a quarter of a mile of one another right now."
All council members were leaning towards putting restrictions on location and design standards for future car washes. The regulations include the number of car washes per capita, which right now, we're at one car wash for every 7,600 people. Another regulation would mandate that car washes be at least one mile away from each other.
"I think they could even be further, I'm not sure that we even need them a mile apart from each other it seems a pretty excessive," said Lewis.
I spoke with some people at one of the 28 car washes in the city and all were in agreement that something needs to happen.
"I understand that this is America, we have entrepreneurship and you could put up a carwash anywhere, but I think there are other grocery stores or other things, I'm not sure exactly at the top of my head, but it would seem off the main streets or because other businesses that could be there," said Lewis.
The city will now go back and start to define exactly what constitutes a car wash to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
