Looking at the city meeting calendar - Week of June 12, 2023
Here are the big items on the city meeting calendar this week…
Downtown Parking Study
Monday, June 12 at 6PM
Last night was the presentation of the results of the Downtown Parking Study at the John Zon Center. I as hoping it would also be streamed on GCTV, but couldn't find it. Now I guess I wait for it to be posted on YouTube. (Update: The recording is now available and I recommend watching it. I will get around to posting a summary in the next day or two, but in the meantime, you can find my watch-along notes over on the Mastodon feed.)
I will admit to some degree of skepticism regarding these sorts of studies. While I get that we don't want to make big investments without gathering data first and having external professional recommendations, there is the risk that these affairs are mostly an opportunity for some consultants to charge the city $25k for a slide presentation.
Even if they do have a bunch of great ideas, implementation will requiring spending a ton of money and is dependent upon a consistency of local government that I am not sure we can assume. A new administration in the mayor's office or a different make-up of the City Council (or even just a change of staffing in the Planning office) likely means it all gets shoved into the bin, never to be spoken of again.
I am thinking of the similar study 5 or 6 years ago (maybe longer?) when Maureen Pollock was still Planning Director. "Safe Streets"1 or some such, maybe? There was a big study and I remember going to some presentation at the Olver Transportation Center. Then Pollock moved on and as far as I know, that was the last we ever heard of any of that. Maybe the new crosswalk at Olive St. and Bank Row came out of that project.
I will also admit to some degree of morbid curiosity here, given that downtown parking tends to be the third rail of Greenfield politics and a topic about which a lot of people seem to have inexplicably strong feelings.
Economic Development Council
Tuesday, June 13 at 6PM
The Economic Development Committee of the Greenfield City Council is meeting this evening at 6p. The meeting is taking place at City Hall, or can be joined via Zoom.
The full meeting notice and detailed agenda is here.
There are three motions on the agenda:
- The zoning changes (General Commercial to Planned Industry) to 5 parcels along the French King Highway
- A liquor license for the Greenfield Garden Cinema
- Termination of the tax incentive for the Ford & Toyota dealership
Assuming they get to everything on the agenda and nothing is tabled, the EDC will discuss I and takes votes on each of these motions. From there, they will head to the full City Council for final discussion and voting, which will be informed by whatever happens at EDC this evening.
I don't know the background of the TIF2 termination for Ford/Toyota, i.e., whether it is simply part of the built-in process now that their expansion and new construction is done, or if there is more to it than that.
Appointments & Ordinances Committee
Looks like tomorrow night's schedule meeting of the Appointments & Ordinances Committee has been cancelled.
School Committee
Wednesday, June 14 at 6PM
So I think that leaves us with Wednesday evening's School Committee meeting as this week's Main Event.
There are a smattering of other small board and commission meetings as well, but School Committee is likely to be the biggest, longest, and most eventful session of the week. Their meetings tend to run long—often up to and past the three-hour mark—and their agenda this week has some pretty weighty topics, as well as an executive session.
The big items on the School Committee's agenda this week are:
- Final discussion and vote on the FY24 budget for the Greenfield Public Schools
- A vote on whether or not censure Mayor Wedegartner for the Recorder op-ed she wrote in which she revealed her votes during an executive session
- Discussion of and voting on the GPS 3-year strategic plan
There is also an executive session on the agenda for this week's meeting.
The full agenda for this meeting can be found here. The meeting will be taking place at the John Zon Community Center. I have not been able to locate a Zoom link for this meeting, either on the city website or the School Committee's section of the GPS website.
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It was "Complete Streets". ↩
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Tax Increment Financing, a part of the Massachusetts Economic Development Incentive Program that allows municipalities to set up agreements with businesses whereby the business pays a lower taxes for a set period of time while it does some sort new development, on the theory that the increased economic growth that the development will generate will offset the loss in tax revenue ↩
The Downtown Parking Study suggests Greenfield has plenty of parking, but we need to rethink how we manage it.
I spent some time watching Monday evening's presentation of the results of the Greenfield downtown parking study:
The background
This study was funded with $25k from the state and the idea was to gather data about parking resources and utilization in downtown Greenfield. It was run by Stantec (an external consultant) and work kicked off this past winter.
Data-gathering ran through April of this year and involved a lot of on-the-ground observation and counting of cars in spaces at different times of day and days of the week, as well as analysis of violation data, permit and parking pricing, and locations of lots and spaces.
The goal of the study was to provide data that would give us a better picture of actual parking utilization downtown, especially as new projects like the library, the skate park, and the Wilson's redevelopment move along. The hope is that findings will provide some ground to the often contentious public discourse around town regarding downtown parking and help to inform the Main Street Redesign project that is currently in its early design phase.
The findings
There are currently around 3000 parking spaces in the downtown Greenfield area which, for the purposes of this study, runs west to east from Conway Street to High Street. It is bounded on its north side by Devens and Church Streets, with and Prospect Street and the railroad tracks south of Main Street marking the south boundary, plus the short dog-leg of Hope Street down to Russell hanging off the bottom.
Of those 3000 parking spaces, about 80% are restricted—either in private lots or otherwise restricted (e.g., "For customers only," like the Greenfield Savings Bank lot).
The average peak time for parking utilization in the downtown area is Thursday morning at 10AM. Even at this time, total utilization of the spaces across the downtown area was just 55%
For the core downtown parking areas—the on-street spaces on and just off Main Street—the peak usage time is 6PM on Thursdays. Saturday mid-morning is a similarly busy time for this subset of spots. However, during both of these times, all the rest of the parking in the downtown area is only 34% utilized. So, Main Street itself feels very busy and it is hard to find a spot there during these windows, but there is plenty of parking only a few minutes' walk away.
Stantec also noted that while the cost of parking varies by location, it is static over time—except for being free on evenings and weekends. Our parking rates are quite low, as are our fines for parking violations.
The analysis
3000 downtown parking spots is, according to the Stantec folks, "a lot" for a town the size of Greenfield. Otherwise, there is not anything unique or particularly special about our situation.
Aside from the on-street parking during the off-hours (Thursday evening, Saturday morning/mid-day, etc.), downtown parking is largely underutilized. Across the walkable downtown area, Greenfield actual has much more parking than it needs, although a lot of it is currently restricted by private ownership.
The sense that there is a parking problem in Greenfield is mostly due to the difficulty of finding an on-street spot along Main Street during the peak core utilization hours. However, those times—evenings and weekends—are when parking is free. In other words, the price of parking is not responding to demand. There is plenty of parking during these times of perceived congestion, but there is no incentive for people to find it, even if it would add just a minute or two to their walk.
Additionally, the most expensive parking in town is the Olive Street Garage at $1 per hour.1
Stantec also took a look at Main Street itself, including the intersection of Main and Federal and the various crosswalks. They found Main Street to be quite wide, leading to perilous and intimidating crossings, with long walk-times at the crosswalks.
Overall, their conclusion is that while Greenfield has plenty of parking in the downtown area—too much, in fact—we do a poor job of allocating it (via pricing) in a way that is responsive to demand. Free parking on evenings and weekends incentivizes people to grab all the available on-street spots on Main Street regardless of what their needs are, leading to the hyper-localized congestion issues we currently see.
The recommendations
Stantec had a number of recommendations to make based on the data they gathered and their analysis of that data. The biggest one is to adjust the pricing structure of parking downtown. Increase the cost of parking in the highest-demand spots—the on-street spot on Main—get rid of the free parking on evenings and weekends and make free parking available for longer-term needs off-street. They suggest that rates at the Olive Street Garage should be lowered to make that a more attractive option.
Another big recommendation is to eliminate the time limits on all parking spots in town. While the idea of time limits is to promote turnover of spots, the actual outcome is to make parking more annoying and to increase violations. Their experience in other municipalities is that turnover is better handled via pricing.
They note that much of the off-street parking in downtown is privately held and restricted in one way or another and that all of these lots sit largely empty most of the time. They suggest the city work with the owners and incentivizing them to make these space public, either via revenue-sharing or service-sharing (e.g., the DPW taking on the plowing of the lots, etc.)
More broadly, they recommend that since the data shows that downtown parking is vastly oversupplied (remember, it never gets up 55% full), we ought to look at zoning and other regulatory changes to encourage development of these open lots. Zoning in our downtown core does not require businesses to provide parking, but there are parking minimums around the edges of downtown. They suggest changing this zoning to eliminate these requirements.
Finally, they suggest that parking permit prices be increased (we are abnormally low there as well) and adjust the fees for violations. Currently, resident can only purchase parking permits annually; a monthly option would give people more flexibility and would allow better alignment of parking supply to demand. In terms of violations and fines, the recommendation is to back off on the ticket-writing but increase fines for repeat offenders. Eliminating time limits would help here, but they also suggest a warning for first-time offenders rather than a fine right off the bat.
Conclusions
The big message here is that Greenfield has a very walkable downtown with plenty of parking and that we would even likely see a benefit if we were to eliminate a non-trivial number of spaces. We certainly should not be talking about adding any parking downtown.
I think the tricky part here is that this kind of stuff tends to be counterintuitive for a lot of people. If it's hard to find parking, the answer is to create more parking, right? No—just like adding more lanes to highways only makes traffic congestion worse, creating more parking or making the parking we have cheaper or free will only compound our problems.
The other problem is that while the answer may broadly be to reduce the number of parking spots and adjust pricing, that is a tough sell to the individual business owner who wants the spots in front of their shop to be free, or the resident who wants to be able park on the street in front of their house overnight.
In a larger city, these needs and demands tend to average out across the hundreds of thousands (or millions) of residents. In Greenfield, the one angry shop owner can harangue the Mayor's office, and the resident who feels entitled to free parking anywhere in town because "I pay taxes" can post about it constantly on Facebook. It is challenging to get those two needs—efficiently allocating parking supply and meeting residents' needs—aligned.
Personally, I think all of these recommendations are spot on, and I don't find the data all that surprising. My anecdotal experience the last fifteen years lines up with the data they present. Judging from the Q&A that followed the presentation, the people in the room were enthusiastic and supportive as well. However, I suspect it may have been a fairly self-selecting audience, and I imagine many of the recommendations will encounter moderate to stiff resistance as they trickle out into the public conversation around town.
As to where this analysis and recommendations go from here, I expect they will feed into the bigger Main Street Redesign project as it starts to spin up over the next few years. Of course, a lot of that will depend on how things may or may not shift in the Mayor's office and on the City Council in the meantime.
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It has been pointed out to me in the comments that that the parking garage is currently $1 per clock hour, not $1 per sixty minutes. My bad. ↩
The Downtown Parking Study presentation is now available on the city website.
A PDF full slide deck from Monday evening's Downtown Parking Study presentation has now been posted on the city's website.
I strongly suggest watching the video and checking out the deck. While I posted my summary a few days ago, many of the questions and concerns I have seen raised in online conversations were at least addressed in the study.
You may not agree with the answers and the recommendations—and I'm not necessarily trying to advocate for any of them specifically. However, I will note again that many of the assumptions and assertions that we hear frequently in the public discourse on this topic—we need to lower parking prices to attract people, we need to build more spaces to alleviate congestion, the primary reason for parking meters is to generate revenue, etc.—are not necessarily supported by the data. If nothing else, I'd say read the report and make sure that the objection you're raising hasn't already been addressed.
Looking at the city meeting calendar - Week of June 19, 2023
There are now agendas posted on the city website for all of this coming week's (June 19, 2023) town meetings.
Let's take a look and see what we've got on deck…
Board Of Assessors - 6/20, 9:30 AM
First up is the Board Of Assessors on Tuesday 6/20 at 9:30AM. It's taking place at City Hall. There doesn't look there will be a Zoom link for it.
There is also not much detail on the agenda, just "Excise Weeks, Ad for Position, Report from Assessor's Office & RRG" under new and old business, and then an executive session on tax abatements.
On a side note, recordings of these sorts of board and commission meetings only ever randomly seem to make it to GCTV. There was a brief discussion at this month's Committee Chairs meeting about the inconsistency of meeting recordings (I think it mostly depends on who's running the meeting), but these bodies all fall under the Mayor's office. City Council VP Forgey stated at that meeting that she and/or President Guin would make a recommendation to the mayor that these meetings should be recorded.
Council On Aging - 6/20, 1:00 PM
Next is the Council On Aging, also on Tuesday but at 1PM. This meeting will be at the John Zon Community Center. No Zoom link is listed for this one either.
The agenda is pretty generic—mostly the usual reports from various officers—but they will also be voting on new officers for the new fiscal year.
Board Of License Commissioners - 6/20, 4:00 PM
Still on Tuesday, June 20, we've then got the Board Of License Commissioners at 4PM. This meeting will take place at City Hall.
In a previous post, I light-heartedly dismissed this as one of the less significant meetings. However, if you want to have some event in town (or an "automated amusement device," apparently!), your approval has to through this body, so it is actually pretty informative.
For example, I have only just learned from the agenda that there is apparently going to be a block party on my street later this summer.
Ways & Means Committee - 6/30, 6:00 PM
Finally at 6PM on Tuesday, we've got the Ways & Means Committee of the City Council.
The committee will be meeting at City Hall and this one will be on Zoom.
There are motions on the agenda for a bunch of end-of-fiscal-year transfers between various municipal funds, as well as a vote on a memorandum of understanding with the union representing the City Hall and library employees.
Keep in mind that votes in committees like this are just recommendations that will then be brought to the full City Council for the final vote up or down.
Ways & Means also has a bunch of items up for discussion this week, including various reservations of Community Preservation funds, a payment approval for some solar stuff, and "Moving operating budget to June and Capital Improvement to January."
School Committee - 6/21, 3:30 PM.
Then we're on to Wednesday at 3:30PM for a special School Committee meeting.
This one is online only, and interestingly, they're using a Google Meet link this time around.
The only item on the agenda is an executive session related to an unspecified collective bargaining or litigation. The committee will not be returning to open session once the executive session is done.
City Council - 6/21, 6:30 PM
And that brings us around to the final meeting for the week, the City Council's regular monthly meeting.
The meeting kicks off at 6:30PM at the John Zon Community Center and will also be on Zoom.
The full agenda for this month's City Council meeting can be found here: https://cms5.revize.com/revize/greenfield/DocumentCenter/Government/CityCouncil/City%20Council%202023-06-21%20Agenda.pdf
In addition to the standing agenda items—approval of minutes, reports from the Mayor and the Superintendent, public comment, etc.—they have a bunch of board/commission appointments and several funds/property transfers to approve (or not).
The council will also be taking up (yet again) the motion to rezone properties along the French King Highway from Commercial zoning to Planned Industrial zoning. Variations on this proposal have bounced around quite a bit the last few months, with this current version having now received unanimous positive recommendations over the last few weeks from both the Economic Development Committee and the Planning Board. It will be interesting to see whether these various discussions will have done anything to assuage the concerns of some councilors as to whether the land could be used for housing.
And then there is the termination of the TIF agreement for the Ford/Toyota dealership expansion. Based the documentation in the agenda, it looks like they have reached the end of the TIF, and all parties agree that the terms have been met on both sides.
A few other items on the Council's agenda:
- approval of an all-alcohol liquor license for the Garden Cinema
- approval of a memorandum of understanding with the union for city hall and library employees
- acceptance of the solar array at the DPW building
Wrapping up
That's it for this coming week's town meetings. Next week looks to be a fairly light one as we head into the end of the month and the Independence Day holiday.
I expect July and August to be relatively light as well. With budget season finally done and lots of people headed out for summer vacations, the City Council typically tends to keep their agendas pretty sparse over the summer. But we'll see…
So long, old library.
You served us well!