GREENFIELD — On a recent afternoon, the stylists at Elizabeth Alison’s Salon on School Street watched through the window as a driver pulled into a permit-only parking space across the street, put money in the kiosk and displayed the receipt on her windshield.
“She’s going to get a ticket,” said Tina Hickey, who works at the salon.
“We do this all day,” co-worker Hannah Bellows added.
Twenty minutes later, a parking attendant came through the lot and ticketed several cars parked without permits.
At the beginning of the month, the town changed the 84-space Ames Street lot across from the salon from a mixture of kiosk “pay and display” and permit parking to mostly reserved permit parking, with the exception of five pay-and-display spaces and three handicapped spots.
Elizabeth Bellows-Bassett, owner of the salon, said the signs in the lot are misleading. A “pay parking” sign invites drivers into the lot, but the few pay and display spots are always taken. She said permit parking-only signs are posted too high for people to notice, and the kiosk leads drivers to think its OK to pay and park in the reserved spots. Hence the tickets.
Changes in the Ames Street lot are part of a new downtown parking plan aimed at addressing a parking shortage created by the reopening of the new courthouse next month. John Lunt, assistant to the mayor for special projects, said the temporary plan addresses the two-year gap between the courthouse reopening Feb. 6 and the projected completion of a 350-space Olive Street parking garage.
Lunt said the town has to accommodate 230 to 250 more cars downtown on a daily basis due to the courthouse reopening, businesses moving employees downtown and new businesses moving downtown. The courthouse expansion eliminated a parking lot and brought more workers to the east end of Main Street. Lunt said with the additional people, the town’s municipal parking will be at 99 percent capacity in the downtown area.
Business owners like Bellows-Bassett and visitors to downtown have felt the lack of parking more acutely since the plan went into effect Jan. 1. The town is not only at capacity, but parking lots have also been rearranged to reserve spaces for permit parkers during business hours on weekdays, reducing the amount of pay-and-display spaces in some lots. The reserved parking is primarily for employees of downtown establishments like businesses, GCC’s downtown center, the YMCA and the courthouse.
Lunt said the town is listening to feedback from business owners and other individuals and making adjustments as needed. He said although it’s not possible to please everyone, the Parking and Traffic Commission, which put together the plan after seven months of research, is trying its best to balance a wide variety of interests. He said the town is also looking at how to add more downtown parking for next year.
“We try to work with everybody. We know it was a big project and we’d have to adjust as we go along,” Lunt said, adding, “At this point, what we’re doing is we’re working with the last handful of people who have particular concerns that they would like us to try to address. We will do the best we can to do that.”
Despite those efforts, some business owners believe there should have been better communication from the town before the plan went into effect, saying they felt blindsided by the changes.
Permit-only spaces are enforced Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Before and after those hours, anyone can park in permit spots for free. On Saturdays between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., people can park in permit spots, but have to pay at a kiosk and display the receipt on their windshield.
Bellows-Bassett and other women who work at the salon said they fear the lack of daytime parking nearby could hurt business.
“It’s not fair to the clients that we’ve had for 15 years, the loyal customers that can no longer find parking,” said Kelly Stevens.
Bellows-Bassett said she’s received numerous complaints from clients since the change went into effect. She said many are elderly and can’t walk long distances or navigate icy sidewalks during the winter.
The women who work at the salon said they used to park in the 4-hour pay and display spaces in the Ames Street lot, as there are only two private spots in front of the business. Bellows-Bassett said because the five remaining pay and display spaces in that lot are now always taken, they have to find 2-hour metered parking on the street or park farther away. She said that presents a problem, as they cannot legally leave the premises to pay meters when clients have chemicals in their hair.
“What happens when they’re in here having a 2- to 3-hour chemical service and their meter runs out?” Hickey added.
This year, the parking permit process was done through a lottery system. Entrants were assigned a selection date at random, and on that date they were able to purchase a permit on a first-come, first-served basis at Town Hall. Permits are for assigned lots this year; last year, permit holders could park in any permit spot in town.
Lunt said some municipal lots, like the Ames Street lot, became more permit-intensive because of demand from employees at surrounding businesses.
“There are competing interests. There are people pushing hard for permits,” he said.
In an effort to accommodate both interests, Lunt said the town will reach out to permit holders in the Ames Street lot to find out whether any would be willing to move elsewhere to free up more pay-and-display parking. He said in the meantime, the town could use signs in 5-gallon buckets full of concrete to create more temporary spaces, and is looking into creating more metered spaces on School Street this spring.
The town is also in the process of lowering the cost of parking meters on side streets and increasing the time limit, which Lunt hopes will make things easier for businesses like Elizabeth Alison’s and give those parking an incentive to move off of Main Street.
He said the town has also cleared its wait list for parking permits and expects to be able to accommodate more people who want to purchase permits, on a limited basis.
In the new plan, Lunt said the Parking and Traffic Commission tried to keep an equal number of permit and meter/kiosk spots in town. There are currently 524 permit spaces and 512 meter/kiosk spaces downtown.
One of the biggest issues the commission had to address was that most municipal parking lots are west of Federal Street, but most permit parkers want to park east of Federal Street because that’s where the banks, courthouse and other large employers are.
“We did work to try and get people, in general, as close to their place of business as we could for permits, but we left at least some (pay and display spots) in each lot,” he said. “We’re going back now and assessing whether we should try to free up a few more kiosk spaces in particular lots or whether lots need a few more permits. It’s hard to predict exactly.”
This year, the town had to create 99 new on-street permit spaces in the Franklin and Church Street and Prospect Street areas to accommodate the extra cars by reserving side-street parking, some of which was once free. Permits ranged in price depending on proximity to the east side of downtown — from $200 for permits in the farthest municipal lots and on-street spaces to $400 for the Fire Station and Hope Street lots.