Members of the volunteer group that oversees on-street parking in New Canaan are urging the owner of a downtown business to work with them or risk exacerbating an emotionally charged dispute and potentially dangerous situation.
The Police Commission already has spent more time on traffic and safety concerns near AC Auto Body than it has on hiring issues, according to commissioner Paul Foley.
“This is ridiculous and it is still not solved,” Foley said at the start of the commission’s regular meeting, held Wednesday in the training room at the New Canaan Police Department. “It would be resolved if this individual would perform in a neighborhood way.”
Turning to members of NCPD that are working with both AC Auto Body owner Anthony Ceraso and neighbors who say the way he parks customers and shop vehicles blocks sight lines, Foley added: “You want to convey that to [Ceraso]? That we are concerned again about this action that he continues to do and if there isn’t any cleanup, especially now that snow coming and all the other stuff, that we will go to [Planning & Zoning]. I suggest one more shot and then we will go to P&Z.”
It isn’t clear just what “going to P&Z” would involve.
Neighbors have indicated that Ceraso should not be allowed to park cars up against the street because his property is in the B Residential Zone, which requires a 25-foot setback for accessory structures (see page 58 here), though it isn’t clear whether a parked car qualifies as such. Under state law, no vehicle can remain parked within 25 feet of a stop sign or crosswalk.
Foley said that he recently came to the stop sign at Maple and Main Streets and could not see southbound traffic on Main because of a tow truck parked in the first spot to his left.
“It was there last night when I was going out to dinner, you cannot see, so now I have to pull out a quarter way into the lane,” Foley said.
Police Commission Chairman Stuart Sawabini said that he recently was approaching Main Street from the opposite side, up East Maple, and Ceraso “a huge SUV parked right on the corner and you couldn’t see” northbound traffic on Main.
February will mark two years that the commission has been wrangling with the problem of AC Auto Body’s tow trucks and customer vehicles. Faced with concerns from neighbors and police about how two trucks that used to be allowed to park on East Maple Street were “pinching” the roadway dangerously, officials removed a privilege that Ceraso had enjoyed, as the town’s emergency auto wrecking service, to keep them there.
Ceraso then paved over a grassy verge fronting Main Street and started parking trucks there, worsening an already-poor sight line for motorists seeking to exit from East Maple onto Main. Suggestions from a traffic engineer that he restore that area, as well as to reduce the height of a fence that runs atop a stone wall in front of his parking lot, have gone unheeded.
Instead, town officials are trying to reconfigure some of the striping at the intersection of East Maple and Main in order to slow down cars whizzing by and to give motorists trying to get onto Main—as well as pedestrians seeking to cross it—a better view of what’s coming.
Commissioner Sperry DeCew said “there should be no commercial vehicles in that first spot” on Main Street off of Maple, “and there really shouldn’t be any parking on the first spot [of Ceraso’s own lot] as you turn onto East Maple Street where his commercial vehicles used to be parked.”
Sawabini called on Police Capt. John DiFederico to speak to Ceraso about the matter.
“Hopefully this stays a very amicable relationship,” Sawabini said. “And if it continues without it, then he puts us into a corner and we start to explore alternatives which we do not want to do, so let’s make another verbal appeal and say, ‘Look, really, help us out here. Help yourself out.’ ”
Why not make East Maple one way from Main Street that would fix the visibility problem and move it to Hoyt Street.