Parking garages or metered parking? As downtown parking nears ‘crisis’ level, officials debate solutions

Finding a parking spot downtown has become an increasingly difficult endeavor as more stores, restaurants and apartments have opened up on Main Street, according to local business owners and residents.

“It’s insane,” said Bobby Hartmann, a downtown resident and a member of the Riverhead Business Improvement District board of directors. “Parking downtown between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. is almost impossible.”

Hartmann, who lives on the north side of Main Street, says he often needs to park a block or two away from his apartment during the daytime. He attributes the overcrowded parking lots to the lunch and dinner customers at local restaurants and the new apartment buildings that have opened up at Woolworth and Summerwind.

“I truly can’t find a parking spot,” he said.

Although a lack of parking is certainly a better problem for downtown Riverhead than Main Street’s decades-long struggle to draw more businesses to its empty storefronts, it is still a problem nonetheless.

“I don’t think it’s a crisis yet, but we’re getting there,” said Supervisor Sean Walter. “When we have a real problem with parking downtown, we should all be smiling.”

But business owners believe the problem should be addressed sooner rather than later.

“It’s getting worse all the time,” said Ray Pickersgill, owner of Robert James Salon, president of the Riverhead Business Improvement District and a member of the parking district committee. “My customers have to park across the parking lot, a ways away from the salon. We really do have an issue, and I’m worried about it for my business.”

“I’ve had a lot of complaints,” said Councilman John Dunleavy, the town board liaison to Riverhead’s parking district committee. “People have stopped me in the street and told me they can’t find parking.”

Most of downtown Riverhead lies within the town’s parking district, which spans from Main Street just west of Griffing Avenue east past Ostrander Avenue.

Click this link to open a larger image in a new tab: Downtown Riverhead Public Parking Lots

Usually, when the owner of a property builds a commercial structure, the owner is required to provide a certain number of off-street parking spaces, depending on the use of the property. For businesses in Riverhead’s parking district, however, parking is provided by the parking district. Those businesses pay a parking district tax in lieu of providing their own off-street parking.

But parking in the parking district has become more and more limited as new businesses, restaurants and apartments have moved into the area. New apartments in particular have created an influx of parked cars that Dunleavy says “needs urgent attention.”

Within the last two years, the Summerwind and Woolworth apartments opened up on Main Street with 52 and 19 apartments respectively. An additional proposal for apartments above the Long Island Science Center would bring 48 more apartments downtown. Although that proposal includes an area for parking on the ground level of the building, that area would provide less than 48 spaces.

“If a couple lives in one apartment, they’ll each have a car,” said Councilman John Duleavy, the town board liaison to Riverhead’s parking district. “If they have children, they might have cars. If they’re having guests over, they’ll have cars. These are things we need to be talking about.”

Downtown Riverhead is actually zoned to allow up to 500 apartments maximum. “We have a lot less than that right now, and we’re already having problems,” Dunleavy said. “Before we do much more downtown, we have to see what we’re going to do with the parking situation.”

He also emphasized the toll the parking shortage is taking on businesses downtown. “If you go downtown to shop, you don’t want to park three miles away and walk,” he said. “You want to park near the store. We need to take care of these establishments and make sure there is adequate parking.”

Officials have attempted to alleviate the issue with timed parking spots, limiting parking in certain areas to between one and three hours. Those rules were not enforced until recently, however, and Dunleavy does not believe time limits will solve the issue for occupants of Main Street apartments, who will need to keep their cars parked for longer.

“When they zoned downtown for that many apartments, they didn’t have the foresight to think about where those people will park,” Dunleavy said. “We just don’t have the space.”

Metered parking is another option, according to Town Supervisor Sean Walter. “That ultimately is the next step,” Walter said. “A metered parking system would also further raise revenue and keep the parking moving, so that people aren’t going to park forever and just stay there.”

Walter and Dunleavy both suggested that “dilapidated” homes along side streets like Union Avenue and East Avenue might also be condemned to make room for additional parking lots dowtown.

“We would preserve the nice older buildings,” Walter said, “but some of those other deteriorating buildings can be taken down. I see it as a beautiful urban renewal plan.”

But Dunleavy says that parking garages are the only long-term solution, something that Walter is uncertain about.

“The problem is that there is only so much surface parking available,” Dunleavy said. “How much surface do we have that we can expand the parking lots? We don’t want to take up all our flat surfaces, specially if we want to revitalize – you want those flat surfaces so that if somebody wants to bring something to the town, you have room for them.

“I think a parking garage is the way to go,” he said. “We would have to go out and bond it – we don’t have the cash – but I think it’s the way to go.”

Pickersgill agreed. “We need a parking garage,” he said. “There’s no way around it.”

He added that the parking district can only buy so much property. “We don’t have any money to begin with. And for the cost of buying up those homes to put a parking lot in, you’re only picking up maybe an additional 100 spots. It’s not worth it.”

Although the cost of a parking garage could run into the millions, Pickersgill says there may be grants available to help fund its construction. “We really need the town to explore the grants and see where we can get some money,” he said. “But at the end of the day, a parking garage would solve all the problems that we have.”

Walter, however, maintains that a parking garage would be too expensive for the town to consider. “I just don’t think the town has the financial ability to do it,” he said. “If you look at towns like Patchogue and Port Jefferson, they function quite well without parking garages.”

Walter also believes a parking garage is inconsistent with the town’s aesthetic. “We’re a rural town,” he said.

Two years ago, architect Martin Sendlewski went to the parking district committee with a plan to boost downtown parking by 57 stalls. It would require removing some islands, reconfiguring travel lanes and re-striping some areas of both parking lots on either side of Main Street. No action was ever taken on that plan, as the parking district’s funds were depleted, according to officials.

Dunleavy will bring the parking district committee’s recommendations to the town board after the committee’s next meeting on April 23.