New Canaan parking officials soon are expected to get new technology to help them do their jobs more efficiently while sparing commuters the hassle of keeping physical permits on hand.
Use of a license plate reader by the New Canaan Parking Bureau is expected to stem a steady stream of complaints about retaining all sorts of permits—hanging, paper, sticker—and to allow enforcement officers to devote more time to locations where they’re needed.
“Simply, put we are going to use the ALPR [Automated License Plate Reader] technology, combined with our permit database, to go through the lots quickly, help the commuters out and you will not have to have any permit in your car at all,” Parking Bureau Supervisor Karen Miller said at a March 19 Town Council meeting, held in the Visitors Center at the New Canaan Nature Center.
An account with the bureau itself already has the $18,000 needed for the reader—from Brewster, NY-based ELSAG North America—and the Board of Selectmen on Tuesday will vote on whether to approve the purchase. The Town Council voiced unanimous support for it.
To start, the reader will be used only in commuter lots to make sure the cars parked there are permitted—a more time-consuming task as it’s done now by spot-checking for physical permits.
New Canaan Director of Information Technology Christopher Kaiser said the equipment itself includes two cameras mounted on the bureau’s car, front and rear, with a laptop in the vehicle directly connected to a “breakout box” from those cameras, so that “every time you go by a license plate it will scan it, and if it’s a hit, it will automatically show up. If not, it doesn’t register at all.”
Council member Roger Williams—following assurances that no motorist’s privacy would be compromised (beyond what sunshine law provides)—voiced support for the reader.
“I think the idea that those of us who have had to peel things off our windshield or take tags off our mirrors or wonder what the heck we did with that cardboard thing we need to throw on the dash to go from car to car, this is a godsend,” Williams said.
Council member John Engel asked whether, by streamlining the work of identifying parking offenders, the town could expect more revenue from the bureau.
Miller replied: “I do not believe that is the driving factor here, but certainly that could be a result.”
The council also inquired whether the more efficient work meant that the Parking Bureau’s headcount could be reduced.
Miller and Parking Commission Chair Keith Richey pointed out that the bureau lost a half-person five years ago and that the result of cutting further, reader or no, would be a loss of parking supervision along major town roads.
Richey said specifically that the bureau’s staff since a change in parking designations must spend more time supervising the area in front of the new (temporary, they say) Post Office at 90 Main St.—and the same will be true at Town Hall and the Locust Avenue lot in the future.