A new municipal parking garage could be in the cards for Westbrook as a potential long-term solution to the city’s parking plans.
At a public hearing Monday night, the city unveiled a tentative plan for changes to parking designed to accommodate potential downtown growth over the next decade or two.
A draft parking study developed by Gorrill-Palmer Consulting Engineers, Inc. offers a variety of options, some of which can be implemented almost immediately, and some that will only occur only after new development requires them.
On Monday, Cindy Murphy of the Frenchtown Neighborhood Association, a member of the committee charged with analyzing Westbrook’s parking situation and potential future needs, outlined the plan. She said the study is still a draft and represents a guide for the administration and the City Council in working out its parking issues.
“Nothing is set in stone,” she said.
The study outlines a parking management plan that combines short-term and long-term parking, parking meters, enforcement of parking regulations by a specially assigned police officer, development of new lots and the construction of a parking garage.
The plan suggests a three-phase implementation dependent upon the city’s needs. In the short term, it suggests the construction of three new parking lots for satellite parking for businesses along with new parking signs and rules. It also calls for the future installation of parking meters across the city. In the long term, it calls for the construction of a municipal parking garage behind CVS on Main Street.
The study, which is available on the city’s Web site, will next go to the Planning Board and then the City Council. Murphy said she expected the plan would go to the council in about a month. The council could then vote to accept the plan as a tentative guide for future projects.
City Planner Brooks More said the plan is designed to serve only as a guide and any time the council is asked to vote on parking measures, it will do so on a case-by-case basis. Therefore, the accepting the plan does not mean a wholesale acceptance of every component of the plan.
“It’s simply a master plan,” said Tom Gorrill of Gorrill-Palmer. “It’s showing what the options are.”
“Hopefully all the things in this place are suggestions that we can tinker with when we do have issues,” said resident Carson Wood, who said he had a fear of mandates because of past practices in the city.
Sam Novick, president of Hub Furniture Company on Main Street, said he questioned the validity of the entire study because retailers weren’t represented properly on the committee who worked on it.
“It’s flawed because there’s no retailer on the committee,” he said.
More responded by saying while the committee didn’t have a retailer on it, it did meet with a representative sampling of business owners from the downtown. Novick said one meeting with certain business owners was not enough and he could not support the plan.
More and Morrill urged him to send suggestions, but Novick said it was too late. Morrill said it wasn’t too late because the plan hadn’t even gone to the City Council yet and, besides, the plan was still only a suggested guideline. Specific actions would still have to be approved individually by the council.
The potential construction of a parking garage has also ruffled the feathers of some residents, especially after the development of the municipal garage at One Riverfront Plaza. In that instance, the city built a municipal parking garage that is fully leased to businesses instead of being available for public parking.
More agreed that the sting from the last municipal parking garage was something the committee recognized before doing the study was “a black eye” that they’d have to address. He said he recognized the significance of coming to the people of Westbrook with talk of another municipal parking lot.
Planning Board member Anna Wrobel questioned whether adding 1,000 parking spaces over the next 10 to 15 years to accommodate new businesses would congest the downtown too much for shoppers the retail businesses are trying to attract.
“Who’s going to want to come shop here if they have to sit in tremendous traffic to get here?” she asked.
More responded that William Clarke Drive was intended to deflect commuter traffic through the downtown and still isn’t built to its potential, and money from new development would allow this to be realized.
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