‘No Place to Park’

NEWBURYPORT – “Less park, more parking” was the refrain Mary Jo Haley, the city’s parking enforcement supervisor, heard repeatedly last week from frustrated employees and potential customers of downtown businesses.
“There is no place to park,” she told the city’s Parking Advisory Committee.
Nancy Harrington, a parking enforcement officer, said she was told by one downtown medical practice, “They are killing our business.”
In one week since construction started on the expanded Market Landing Park on the waterfront, the business owner had five clients move to an Amesbury practice because they could not find a place to park in downtown Newburyport, Harrington said.
“It is a real problem,” said city clerk Richard Burke Jones Wednesday night at a meeting of the parking committee. Jones oversees the city’s parking programs.
After years of planning for the $6 million waterfront park, Onyx Construction began work Aug. 7 on phase 1A of the signature park. The construction, including staging lots of heavy equipment, required that huge sections of the parking lots that served downtown retail stores, restaurants and businesses for decades be fenced off.
Projections are that the fences will come down in late June next year, but some of the spaces in the east and west parking lots on the waterfront will never return.
Part of the city’s challenge is timing. Onxy started in August, one of the busiest times for downtown retailers, who need a strong summer to weather the downturn in sales during the winter. August and September are also busy times for the waterfront yacht clubs.
Planning Director Andrew Port said the city did not know when the contractor would be ready to start construction, but added, “If we started in September, the contractor could not get everything done by late spring.”
The parking committee, which is made up of several council members; Jones; Port, who is managing the construction project, and Andrew Levine, the mayor’s chief of staff, met Wednesday night to discuss the parking crisis.
What the committee heard was nothing new. The East Lot before the construction once had 265 parking spaces that served the downtown shops, restaurants and businesses. After the fences went up last week, it had 41 spaces.
The hope is that next spring, when the fences come down, there may be 70 parking spaces on the East Lot. That is a loss of almost 200 spaces, which was supposed to be made up by the 207 spaces in the new garage on Merrimac Street.
But many downtown parkers do not want to park in the garage.
According to Haley and Harrington, the parking enforcers, who described themselves as the eyes and ears of the city, a lot of visitors and employees do not park in the garage, which is not as convenient. It is a little more than a block away from the Green Street lot and the West Lot on the waterfront.
“I can’t walk an extra block,” Harrington said she heard from frustrated parkers.
The West Lot, which is popular because it is close to restaurants like the Tuscan Grill and Black Cow, had 110 parking spaces before the construction started. Now it has 40. When the fences are removed, there should be about 50 spaces, Jones said.
The plan, designed by the Boston firm Sasaki, is to replace parking spaces with grass as the park is expanded and reshaped.
Complicating the issue is that employees, as well as shoppers and diners, need a place to park while at work. For $20 a month, the city issues employee parking permits. There are 440 employee parking permits, Jones said.
During the summer, employees are not allowed to park in the centrally located Green Street lot between Inn Street and the police station. Its 227 spaces are saved for visitors, shoppers and diners, which the downtown retailers depend on.
There are also about 7,000 resident parking permits, which for an annual fee allow locals free parking in most city lots.
“As I see it, we need to find 40 parking spaces immediately,” Councilor Sharif I. Zeid told the other parking committee members.
Other councilors were skeptical and thought more than 40 were needed.
Among the suggestions to solve the crisis was a proposal to the Newburyport Daily News to lease most of its parking lot next to the Grog restaurant for three months at $3,000 a month. The newspaper staff uses four parking spaces, leaving 27 available.
Jones is also in discussion with the New England Development Corp. (NED), which owns many downtown businesses and all the yacht clubs, about partnering with the city to provide more parking for employees.
The proposal was to have all employees who work for businesses that lease from NED, be required to park at one of the boat yards. That would include the land near Michael’s Harborside restaurant that the restaurant uses for parking.
The city would refund a portion of the employee permit fees at the end of the summer.
“It’s hard enough to retain employees,” Jones said.
The city is requiring the construction crews to park at Cashman Park, although space there is limited by cars that haul in boats.
Councilor Jim McCauley said the parking crisis this summer may force the city to delay construction of phase 2, which is not yet scheduled. He said, “Phases 2 and 3 may look very different.”