Around Town

Officials Approve Road Closure Downtown for ‘Fall Into New Canaan’ in September

By |

Town officials voted this month to allow a prominent nonprofit organization to repeat a successful charity event downtown in September. The Young Women League of New Canaan’s “Fall Into New Canaan” will be held on Sept. 8 in the area occupied in past summers by the Pop Up Park, following the Police Commission’s 3-0 vote approving a street closure for part of that Saturday. During its inaugural event last year, Fall Into New Canaan saw 50 stores participate by donating 10 to 15 percent of profits for the day to a chosen beneficiary organization (Meals-On-Wheels), according to Marley Thackray, president of the Young Women’s League. “We had a wonderful day in town,” she told members of the Commission at their regular meeting, held July 18 at the New Canaan Police Department.

Government

Parking Officials Re-Designate Time Limit in Two Areas on Locust to 30 Minutes

By |

Responding to a business owner’s request, town officials are re-designating an area of Locust Avenue as 30-minute parking. The areas directly in front of the Post Office and Joe’s Pizza across the street long have been two-hour parking, as is the rest of downtown New Canaan. Yet town officials recently confirmed with parking enforcement officers “that the people that were parking on that street were not frequenting businesses like Joe’s Pizza or the Post Office—they were using that area to park and go to an office or other places of work,” Parking Manager Stacy Miltenberg told members of the Police Commission during their regular meeting last week. The town long has urged employees of downtown New Canaan businesses to park in municipal lots and leave coveted on-street parking for those seeking to shop and dine here. Last year, the Parking Bureau issued a new type of permit, in Morse Court and the Park Street Lot, specifically to that end.

News

Police To Step Up Enforcement at New Canaan’s Six Major Car Accident Locations

By |

New Canaan Police say they’re ramping up enforcement at areas where they see the highest incidence of motor vehicle accidents in town. Deputy Chief John DiFederico said Wednesday night that after studying accident history in New Canaan with the department’s lead accident investigator, authorities identified one cluster of intersections downtown and another series along the Route 123 corridor. In downtown New Canaan, motor vehicle accidents occur most frequently at Elm and Park Streets, South Avenue and Cherry Street, and Cherry and Main Streets, according to DiFederico. The other high-accident areas are along Route 123 at Old Norwalk Road, Lakeview Avenue/Little Brook Road and East Avenue/Silvermine Avenue, he said. The downtown crashes involved violations such as unsafe backing on Elm Street, “which would be people backing out of spaces, and then traffic control devices, going through red lights or stop signs, and then lane violations,” DiFederico said at a regular meeting of the Police Commission.

Business

Elm Street To Lose 15 Parking Spaces

By |

The one-way stretch of Elm Street, commercial heart of downtown New Canaan and home to many of its most cherished (if in some cases struggling) local businesses, as soon as next week will lose 15 parking spaces due to its lack of compliance with a little-known state statute. New Canaan long has operated outside a 1949 state law that says, “No vehicle shall be permitted to remain parked within twenty-five feet of an intersection or a marked crosswalk thereat.”

Yet recently, when the Department of Public Works removed the parking striping on Elm Street in order to put in a layer of protective seal, a resident put town officials on formal notice that the existing spaces violated that law, since they were too close to the five crosswalks on Elm between Main and Park Streets. 

In all, after doing the math, New Canaan in bringing itself into compliance with the law will lose 13 spaces (and another two by increasing the width of angled parking by six inches per space—see below). The town last week hired a Fairfield-based transportation consulting firm to find out just what could be done with the parking layout vis-a-vis the state requirement, but “it is what it is,” Police Deputy Chief John DiFederico said Wednesday night during a regular meeting of the Police Commission. As the official local traffic authority in New Canaan, the Commission had to vote to change the parking configuration on Elm Street. “Rock and a hard place,” Chairman Sperry DeCew said during the meeting, held at the New Canaan Police Department.

Government

‘Pop Up Park’ Nixed for 2018; Volunteers Cite Selectmen Conditions as Unworkable

By |

Noting that the Pop Up Park’s volunteer organizers had failed to obtain insurance, a sponsor or Special Events permit to operate the makeshift gathering space downtown—conditions laid out last month—members of the Police Commission on Wednesday night withdrew their approval of a necessary street closure for the park. Though the Board of Selectmen this month granted conditional approval for a three-week run, those who operate it came to find that the sponsors they found were “not excited about the new conditions” attached to it, according to Barbara Wilson, a member of the volunteer Pop Up Park committee. “All of our sponsors have withdrawn because they did not feel the items that we had to address and accept were in their best interests,” Wilson told members of the Police Commission at their regular meeting. “So we don’t have any sponsors. Additionally, the sponsor we had that was going to pay for insurance has withdrawn after talking with legal counsel.