A1A repairs a concern for Flagler Beach businesses

With the summer travel season coming up, tourism-dependent businesses are preparing for the annual rush of visitors all over the country. But with a major road construction project underway on State Road A1A in Flagler Beach, business owners there have more to worry about than weather forecasts and consumer spending plans. For a look at how the roadwork is affecting businesses along A1A, Eric Cooley, owner of the Flagler Beach 7-Eleven and a Flagler Beach city commissioner, offers the local spin.

Has the A1A construction affected your business at all?

Yes. The biggest challenge is the traffic flow. There’s a lot of vehicles that are going around the whole area trying to avoid it. When you look at a lot of tourism sites saying avoid the area due to construction, folks will naturally do that. They’ll go to other destinations; so just seeing those generic alerts, that pushes people away from the city.

Are you hearing concerns from other business owners?

Yes, especially the ones in the construction area, Oceanside and Beach Belly Bob’s, where getting in and out is challenge or where you don’t know how to do it. If you’re not a local, trying to maneuver around these one-way construction setups is really hard.

Do you have concerns as we head into the busy tourism season that this could have an impact?

Yes. The problem is this is one of those things that is not really controllable. You can’t say we can’t do it, so a lot of it is just tightening your belt and weathering the storm and when the road is open we should get a boom of traffic coming through because there is no longer the concern of A1A falling into the ocean and the bad reputation it got because when the hurricanes and washouts happened it was all over the headlines. But then there was not headline saying it opened back up. This will actually be a headline that it did open back up. It is a concern and it’s very real and it’s going to affect it and there’s nothing we can do about it, other than control costs and try to get through. It’s a weather-based business when you’re on the beach, so if you have bad weather you have to tighten it up. In this case, we have bad road construction.