The town will sign a land lease with the Red Cross to gain about 15 parking spaces for town employees out back of the organization’s Main Street building, and also re-designate some 20 spaces in the Park Street lot that now are being used by construction workers, in order to keep all the parking directly behind the renovated and expanded Town Hall for visitors, officials say.
By the time Town Hall is fully reoccupied this summer, the number of spaces for visitors will more than double, from 14 to 30, according to the Town Hall Building Committee.
“The good news is that we will have more visitor parking than before,” First Selectman Rob Mallozzi said at the group’s March 23 meeting, held in the Lamb Room at New Canaan Library.
Municipal departments located now above Walter Stewart’s—such as the Assessor, Town Clerk, Registrars of Voters and Tax Collector—will start re-occupying the renovated and expanded 1909 building in early May. The estimated $13 million project, whose price tag is closer to $18 million given costs such as renting temporary offices during construction, remains on budget, the Building Committee said.
Department of Public Works Director Michael Pastore said during the group’s meeting that visitor and employee parking will free up as the construction work gets finished. For example, the first floor to be occupied will have about 15 workers and should see about 20 visitor parking spaces freed up, meaning everyone should be able to park between the Town Hall lot and Red Cross building.
Mallozzi said that four or five spaces at Town Hall itself will be set aside for municipal executives, and that four or five spaces at the Locust Avenue lot will be designated for part-time workers at the newly renovated building. Everyone else who works at Town Hall will be within a very short walk to it, either from the upper level of the Park Street lot or the Red Cross building, Mallozzi said.
Pastore said the building will offer two to three handicapped spaces.
Committee member Kathleen Corbet asked how the town would know that motorists are parking in the newly expanded Town Hall lot for the government building and not to go shopping.
Mallozzi said the Parking Bureau would enforce that, as well as the one-hour limit, as it did before, making its regular parking sweeps.