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February 23, 2006
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MANCHESTER: Where to park? Unlike many Manchester renters, Joel Winters has the luxury of off-street parking. This means he doesn’t have to worry about finding somewhere else to park when a snow emergency is declared. No, his problems begin the next day. It is after a snow emergency has ended that Winters must find an alternate place to park. That’s because, during the hours immediately following a snow emergency, the parking lots behind all the apartment buildings in his Washington Park complex are plowed by his management company. If they don’t want to have their vehicles towed by apartment management, Winters and other renters who have off-street parking permits must jostle for parking spaces with those renters who do not have off-street parking privileges. The battleground is Country Club Drive, a steep, curving, approximately mile-long city street that traverses the approximately 700-unit complex in the northwest part of the city. The result is often bumper-to-bumper parking on both sides of the streets. And now, it appears, the post-snow emergency parking situation on Country Club Drive could become that much tighter as the Manchester Highway Department wants to ban parking entirely on the east side of the street (parking is currently banned there only from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., Nov. 15 to May 15), a prospect that has Winters and several of his fellow renters up in arms. “When everybody does have to get out of the parking lots, there’s not enough space for us all to park on one side of the street, unless you want to park a mile away from where you live and have to walk up and down the [steep, slippery] hill,” Winters said. Public Works Director Frank Thomas, who oversees the Highway Department, said he can sympathize with the angry renters, but that the parking ban is necessary for both safety and efficiency reasons. “With cars parked on both sides during a snow storm, quite frankly we can’t get up the street with plows on occasion. And as a result it becomes a very dangerous situation when that does occur because if they can’t get up, most likely a fire engine can’t get up and other emergency vehicles,” he said. And to boot, he said, there’s an ongoing problem with the number of vehicles that must be towed from Country Club Drive during snow emergencies. The number is usually between 60 and 80 per storm, he said. When that’s the case “it causes us to divert our resources from other parts of the city that may need cars towed off the street ... this has been an issue that’s gone on for years now,” Thomas said. His department’s decision to recommend the parking ban came after a meeting with representatives of Washington Park management and the Manchester Police and Traffic departments to discuss the best way to address the problems over the long term, he said. When Winters heard of the plan he posted fliers in the 20-odd buildings across the complex asking residents to oppose the ban. Enough of them called Thomas that the Public Works director said he decided not to issue an emergency directive, as he had originally planned to do, choosing instead to send the proposal directly to the Board of Mayor and Aldermen’s Traffic and Public Safety Committee, where the residents can have their say. “In talking to [Winters] and others who have called me, I explained what the city’s concerns are and asked if they had any suggestions in resolving it and quite frankly, they didn’t give me any ... maybe they’ll come in with some additional suggestions to the Public Safety meeting,” Thomas said. [Editor’s note: In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that Hippo reporter Will Stewart is a resident of the Washington Park apartment complex.] Comments? Thoughts? Discuss this article and more at hippoflea.com |
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