Though parking at Pine and Park Streets appears to be just fine despite worries about an influx of customers at Mrs. Green’s, the store’s makeshift corral for disused shopping carts isn’t satisfying town planning officials.
Since opening in mid-April, Mrs. Green’s has been lining up the carts along the eastern side of the building (facing Park). That wasn’t part of the original site plan, and the Planning and Zoning Commission last month instructed Mrs. Green’s to create a shrubbery-enclosed corral so that the carts wouldn’t be visible from the street.
Mrs. Green’s last month vowed to create a corral alongside its building at Park and Pine Streets that would screen shopping carts from the road. P&Z is calling this attempt “lame” and that Mrs. Green’s is using the wrong plants. Credit: Michael Dinan
Commissioner Dan Radman during Tuesday’s regular P&Z meeting called what’s been created there a “lame attempt.”
“What power do we have to make them screen properly?” Radman said during the meeting, held in the Sturgess Room of the New Canaan Nature Center’s Visitors Center.
“They still haven’t satisfied what we approved them for, because they did something that wasn’t approved in the first place,” he added.
Commission Secretary Jean Grzelecki said Mrs. Green’s appears to have selected the wrong type of plant for screening—thin and tall rather than full.
Meanwhile, the Police Commission at its June 18 meeting settled the question of how to re-designate the old 15-minute parking spaces along the former Post Office building: 60 minutes for the three spaces across Pine (by the mail drop-off boxes) and 30 minutes along the store itself.
Police Capt. Vincent DeMaio said during the meeting that there appears to be no issue with parking problems caused by Mrs. Green’s.
“We have been monitoring the traffic over there and the parking issues, and to be perfectly honest it has not materialized the way anyone thought it would with chaos and mayhem,” DeMaio said. “Any time you go by there, there’s parking available in the front.”
The P&Z Commission at its meeting granted approval for Mrs. Green’s to use two of the spaces in its underground garage for storage of dry goods and items such as the carts that employees use to move around inventory.
David Ball, an architect representing Mrs. Green’s, told P&Z that a deal has been worked out with Oxygen Fitness next door, where the gym’s clients could use the Mrs. Green’s garage in the morning, and then in the afternoon, Mrs. Green’s customers may use Oxygen spaces. He added that Mrs. Green’s is close to reaching an agreement with Walgreens that would see Mrs. Green’s employees park on the pharmacy’s property.
Why not enclose the area with a 3 or 4 foot high fence?
Or, just enforce Mrs. Green’s original plan filed with the town that included INDOOR shopping carts. As I understand the problem occurred when Mrs. Green’s altered its original plan (in order to add more indoor refrigeration) and then moved the shopping carts outdoors.