Sal Barone, the owner of Family Video and a member of the Plaza Central Business Association, said last week that business owners are pleased by plans to provide more parking for the center of town. “We hope this will give our businesses the boost we need,” Barone said. “We’ve been working on getting more parking for 10 years, ever since the state redesigned the Plaza and took our parking away.” If the town can implement a new plan, Plaza area merchants will get short-term relief to their parking woes, relief for which they have struggled for nearly a decade. Earlier this year, merchants from the Plaza Central Business Association presented the mayor and council with a map that could be used to reconstruct part of the Plaza area in order to provide additional parking. Merchants have complained for more than a decade about the ill-effect state-mandated changes caused when the Plaza was redesigned in 1990. Among other changes, the New Jersey Department of Transportation (DOT) outlawed slant-style parking there. The changes worked miracles in helping curb some of the massive traffic jams that used to clog up Paterson Plank Road, but the move cost many parking spaces. Three years ago – in an effort to ease some of the parking problems – the town installed meters at various locations on side streets jutting out from the shopping district, which merchants claimed marginally helped. The meters, merchants said, were only the first part of a multi-phase program to help increase parking. But some town officials claimed they annoyed local residents already short on street-side parking. May be possible after all The rest of the project seemed in limbo until recently. Barone said the turning point came when Mayor Dennis Elwell and Department of Public Works Superintendent Mike Gonnelli met last month with the business owners, and the officials discovered that the business owners were not looking for a multi-million dollar renovation. “Estimates put this project under $100,000,” Barone said. “Mayor Elwell seemed to be under the impression that we wanted to do what was in the Boswell plan. But we nixed that plan years ago.” (Several years ago, the town hired Boswell Engineering to do a study of the Plaza to determine what could be done to make more parking there. It would have included putting angled parking on both sides of the street and cutting into an island that separates a block-long narrow parking lot-like street from Paterson Plank Road. Officials said the island, which includes a Christopher Columbus monument, served a purpose.) Mayor Elwell said that the new plan would cut into the 10-foot-wide sidewalk in front of the stores instead of cutting into the island, and it will install slant parking along one side of the street instead of two. Elwell said he had received a map from the merchants and passed it along to several other people in order to develop a plan that might provide more parking near Paterson Plank Road, Front Street and Plaza Road. Under the provisions of the new plan, the town will deactivate the section of street along a side of the island, forcing cars from that area to exit onto Irving place, which is a one-way street, and away from Paterson Plank Road, rather than onto Paterson Plank Road. This plan would take up the recommendation of the merchants to do away with one of the DOT’s 1990 designs. In order to force traffic onto Paterson Plank Road, the DOT created a bulge in the sidewalk near the corner of Irving Place, something that kept cars from turning directly onto Irving. “It was feared back then that cars coming off Paterson Plank Road would hit cars turning from the inner side of the island,” said Sal Barone, the owner of Family Video, one of the businesses operating on that block. It was his suggestion that the bulge be removed. According to Elwell, these changes could add as many as 14 spaces to a block that has only six now. “This would make that side of the island into a quasi-parking lot,” Elwell said. While the town has rejected some of the aspects of the Boswell plan, officials believe other aspects are still useable. Elwell asked the Town Council to authorize the town engineer to look over the Boswell study and to come up with an overall cost to the project. “Then we’ll look at it again when Jerry (Perricone) brings it back to us,” Elwell said, noting that it might be possible for the whole project to be done using the town’s Department of Public Works. Elwell said cutting the sidewalk would not cost the town a lot of money but could spell some relief for the merchants. Still in need of a long-term solution The council will also have to look over other parts of the original request by the Plaza businesses, such as the creation of a loading zone on Humboldt Street and meters on Wilson Avenue. The business owners, in order to provide more immediate parking relief, would have the town install six hour-meters instead of two hour-meters along Wilson Avenue, just up the street, and on First Avenue along the Little League Field where no meters currently exist. By metering Wilson Avenue, the employees of the Plaza businesses would have parking that wouldn’t take away from parking customers might use closer to the stores. Elwell said this plan would only be short-term solution, and that he had had discussions with the owners of the Trust Company about air rights above its existing parking lot. While Elwell would not go into details while the matter is still being negotiated, he did say parking was a major issue for the area and would require a longer-term plan than just creating a few parking spaces. The Town Council may also be negotiating for other property in the area that could be turned into parking.
Compromise on Plaza parking: Town seeking way to implement part of merchant’s plan
