Council considers metered parking downtown

LACONIA — Downtown parking could change to metered parking, according to discussion during a recent meeting of the City Council Government Operations & Ordinances.

“This stemmed from a couple of things. It stemmed from we had a resident of a downtown apartment come in and question if there’s an opportunity for us to do something other than the two-hour parking for more residents,” City Manager Kirk Beattie said. “The other piece of it is, I think people have noticed recently, because we have the staffing at the police department right now, to do more enforcement of two-hour parking within the city and to receive more tickets.”

Committee members also reviewed the parking ordinance and viewed sample flyers authorizing overnight parking for some apartment residents during the meeting on Thursday afternoon. 

Included in the materials prepared for the meeting were two example flyers, which residents of 12 Pleasant St. and 610 Main St. could place inside the windshields of their cars, allowing them to park overnight from 9 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. without being ticketed. 

Beattie said it could address that issue for some downtown residents without negatively impacting the availability of parking space during the day, when businesses are open.

“We do have an opportunity to allow overnight parking for a couple of our downtown buildings that have businesses on the first floor and apartments above,” Beattie said. “They put this piece of paper on their window inside their car and then they’ll see that they’re allowed to park overnight in their spots. The reason it was done for overnights is because, presumably, you’re gone during the day for work.”

Because the police department has enough staff to enforce the city parking ordinance, more tickets have been issued for violations of the two-hour rule downtown and Beattie said much of the problem is isolated to a particular city parking lot.

“Probably the biggest issue that we’ve had this year for parking has been behind the Beacon Street West side, which is the city lot behind Bootleggers and that area, just because they’ve been cracking down on the two-hour parking,” Beattie said. 

The city already offers those affiliated with the senior center a way to park for longer than two hours, so the idea isn’t unprecedented. 

“We do have a couple of spots now in the Senior Center, as an example. We do give them special tags that allow them to park longer than two hours,” Beattie said. “That’s in our city lot over on Beacon Street West.”

Ward 6 Councilor Tony Felch said he’d be in favor of placing parking meters downtown. Some parking spaces in the Weirs are already metered.

“To be honest with you, I’d like to see parking meters brought back downtown,” Felch said. “That’s going to deter people from parking long-term.”

Placing parking meters downtown would alleviate the need for heightened parking enforcement and could solve some of the problem, Felch said, noting there are several city lots in the area that already offer parking for free.

“We’ve got free parking over behind the church, maybe make Beacon Street West along the road free,” Felch said.

“As far as the downtown parking lot, then the street parking, we’d just need meters or kiosks — whatever we have to use — and that’s going to solve a lot of problems.”

Councilor Steven Bogert (Ward 5) said it would be important for the city to take a census of the number of apartment units that exist downtown.

“A question would be, 'How many apartments do you have downtown?' Then you would have to relate that to how many parking spaces that the planning department requires for each of those to have, so that you could take stock of how many parking spaces are needed,” Bogert said. “As one is looking at this whole situation, you have people who work night shifts, so their car would be parked there during the day so the two-hour parking in the daytime could be problematic for those people.”

And Planning Director Robert Mora said landlords aren’t required to provide parking in some areas of downtown.

“For multi-family it would be 1.5 spots per unit, though, in the downtown parking overlay, we don’t require people to provide parking,” Mora said. 

Ward 1 Councilor Bruce Cheney, noting residents of the apartments above the Colonial Theatre have one space at the apartment and another in a city lot, said the city could issue one parking permit to apartments for the central parking lot at City Hall and another for a different city lot on Church Street. Several councilors agreed they wouldn’t need to assign specific spots.

Police Chief Matt Canfield said enforcement of meters would fall upon the patrol officer assigned to that sector each shift. 

“We lose our parking enforcement kids at the end of August, so then it just becomes if we have the ability to leave an officer to walk downtown to issue parking tickets,” Canfield said. 

Cheney asked if the city could find a full-time parking officer, and Canfield said they could and that person could oversee an electronic enforcement system. 

“We talked about the parking software too,” Canfield said. “I think those should go hand-in-hand.”