New Canaan officials are deciding whether to introduce new parking rules designed to free up parking spaces for customers—rather than employees—of downtown shops and other businesses.
Specifically, and at the suggestion of a New Canaan resident who is recommending the practice, officials are thinking about adding to 90-minute parking signs a “per day” notice—effectively preventing a motorist from parking the same car twice in the same spot on a given day.
In conjunction with that, members of the volunteer group that oversees on-street parking in New Canaan could designate an entire zone—say, the length of Elm Street—as an area in which a car could only park once per day at its signed time limit.
What likely is happening now, Police Commission Chair Stuart Sawabini said, is that employees at shops wait until a few minutes before their parking time is up, then “go out to the street, drive their car to different location [on the same street] and park again.”
Elm Street on the evening of July 16, 2014. Credit: Michael Dinan
“Hence the white chalk mark that was established by the town parking enforcement officer now disappears underneath the tire and looks as though they’re a new visitor to town,” Sawabini said at the commission’s regular monthly meeting, held in the Training Room at the New Canaan Police Department.
The idea of changing the parking rules had been proposed by New Canaan’s Jeff Holland, the commission said. The group voted unanimously to request that Chief Leon Krolikowski bring the idea to the Parking Commission (which oversees off-street parking and includes the New Canaan Parking Bureau), saying it would like to put it into practice on a trial basis on Elm Street.
Police Capt. Vincent DeMaio said the proposed rules could be enforced by using a newly purchased license plate reader to “monitor the location of each one of those plates.”
Said Commission Secretary Sperry DeCew: “So they can use that [license plate reader] just by driving down Elm Street, electronically tagging these cars and then if somebody was staying three hours or moving again, bingo they could get them.”
Commissioner Paul Foley said the main parking shortage downtown is on Elm Street. “You go down there on Saturday morning or Sunday morning and there are cars everywhere, but there are no customers,” he said. “They’re employees and then they move them around and just keep moving them around throughout the day. There are certain merchants who tend to move a lot.”
The Parking Commission’s next meeting is scheduled for the first week of September.