Around Town

New Loading Zone Planned for Main Street by Former Thali Restaurant Space

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Saying the area directly in front of the former Thali Restaurant on Main Street is the only suitable place for delivery drivers to park their trucks while serving downtown New Canaan businesses, officials plan to install a new loading zone there. The 7 to 11 a.m. loading zone would be coupled with the one directly across Main Street in front of the Post Office, according to Police Capt. John DiFederico. “I was hoping to get onto Forest in the first spot, but Forest Street is so narrow now, plus that first spot has a handicapped space so we would have to have a handicapped spot and it’s just not a suitable place,” DiFederico told members of the Police Commission at their Dec. 15 meeting. The new loading zone comes on the heels of a plan to install “No Parking” signs down the first stretch of East Avenue coming off of Main Street—an area where truckers are accustomed to parking, though it creates sightline and safety problems for motorists and pedestrians as well as concerns for business owners just there.

Business

‘We Need To Find a Compromise’: ‘No Parking’ Signs To Go Up on East Avenue

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Officials say they’re going to post “No Parking” signs outside of an East Avenue business that’s been plagued by truck drivers idling outside the door to make deliveries around New Canaan. Though the truckers cannot park their vehicles outside day spa Ciel Eau at 1 East Ave.—because it’s illegal, bad for business owner Alicia Brandfellner and unsafe for motorists and pedestrians—still, those delivery drivers must be accommodated somewhere so that New Canaan restaurants get deliveries, Police Commission Chairman Stuart Sawabini said. “We clearly need to protect her [Brandfellner’s] business but we also cannot damage their [restaurants’] business,” Sawabini said during the commission’s regular monthly meeting, held Nov. 18 in the Training Room at the New Canaan Police Department. “We need to find a compromise as we go through all this.”

Though there’s a designated 7 to 10 a.m. loading zone in front of Sleepy’s across East Avenue at the start of Forest Street, it’s rarely used because Forest is still in disarray with the mixed-use project going up by Locust Avenue, commissioners said.

News

‘It’s Beyond Our Control’: No Ready Solution To Morning Traffic Back-Up from NCHS Parking Lot

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Town officials, after receiving a resident’s complaint about traffic backed up on Old Stamford Road at Farm Road in the mornings, reached this conclusion: There’s no feasible solution to the problem, short of an expensive New Canaan High School parking lot redesign for which no one has an appetite. Police sent a shift out to investigate the complaint and what the officers discovered is that “it’s not a timing of the light issue,” Capt. John DiFederico said during the Police Commission’s Nov. 18 meeting. “What the issue is, is that there is a very short period of time—maybe 15 minutes—when there is so much volume going into the high school that it backs up all the way down Farm Road so there are cars that cannot turn from Old Stamford Road onto Farm,” DiFederico said at the meeting, held in the Training Room at the New Canaan Police Department. “It has nothing really to do with the light and it has nothing to do with us—it’s just a poorly designed high school parking lot which makes ingress of vehicles so difficult for those 15 minutes.”

A big part of the problem, Police Capt. Vincent DeMaio said, is that the lot is designed so that kids park at the far side—to the right of the access road as you come in—so that they then must cross the road in order to get to the building, which holds up traffic.

Around Town

New Canaan Marks Veterans Day in Ceremony at Town Hall

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Though the many ways that civilians thank U.S. military veterans are right and appropriate—parades, observances, moments of silence and simple thank-you’s, for example—the most complete ways to honor those who have served must deliver both recognition and lasting empowerment, one active serviceman said Wednesday. The United States currently counts about 50,000 homeless veterans—a group that is susceptible to suicide at a 50 percent higher rate than civilians, according to statistics cited by Lt. Todd Kniffen, who commands an officer candidate company of 100 young men and women in Newport, R.I., and whose mother lives here in New Canaan. “Indeed, more veterans have been lost to suicide than have been killed in combat operations since the global War on Terror began,” Kniffen told more than 100 people (many of them in uniform) gathered in the Town Meeting Room for the community’s annual Veterans Day Ceremony, moved inside from its usual location by the Wayside Cross at God’s Acre due to foul weather. “Raise awareness of these facts, volunteer your time and resources to causes that fight these trends. By doing so I promise that you gain, for the world and for the nation, a person whose core motivation is duty and service.

Government

New Crosswalk Opens Safe Pedestrian Routes for Old Kings Highway Residents

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Residents of Old Kings Highway now have a safe pedestrian walkway that connects them to the new sidewalk near the entrance to Kiwanis Park and, ultimately, Main Street and downtown. The Police Commission at its most recent meeting unanimously approved a new crosswalk across Old Norwalk Road at Old Kings Highway. The crosswalk hooks up to a wooded trail that skirts the edge of Kiwanis Park and lets out near its entrance, where a sidewalk completed last year runs up to Main Street. Police Capt. John DiFederico said at the commission’s Sept. 15 meeting that residents of the area had requested the crosswalk last year.