“If you don’t have a vibrant downtown, you don’t have nothing!” says Roy Jay, head of Portland’s Central Parking Systems. “You should never have to roll up the sidewalks at 6 o’clock at night.”
Easy parking is vital to the success of downtown Salem, which is why Jay attracted a deeply interested crowd for his presentation about parking solutions, October 24th at the Grand Theater. Jay is working with the Salem Downtown Partnership (a business group) as well as the City of Salem’s Parking Task Force (initiated by Mayor Anna Peterson, chaired by Councilman Chuck Bennett) to find ways to solve a revenue shortfall and to address the limitations of current policies that create problems for those visiting downtown.
An idea that received positive approval Wednesday night was to hire a private firm to manage and maintain downtown garages and to charge downtown employees $1/day to park there so they will no longer park on the street. Another well-received thought was to remove on-street parking limits while, at the same time, enforcing the rule that employees and business owners can not park on the street.
“Mr. Jay conveyed the importance of looking at the needs of everyone (customers, businesses, city and the community) to create a parking system that maintains vitality in the downtown and serves the community,” says Eric Kittleson, President of the Board of the Downtown Partnership. He says the Partnership will present the results of evening’s voting to the Parking Task Force, which has been working on these issues for the last several months.
On October 29, Jay also met with Salem City staff assigned to the Parking Task Force, when members Doug Rux and Sheri Warghren traveled to Portland to confer with him.
Jay says that all involved are looking for solutions and that both the evening presentation and the meeting with City staff were productive.
Here’s your chance to testify. What do you think?
You can e-mail your testimony Anytime before Nov20
Parkinginput@gmail.com
or
Testify in person on:
Nov6 2012 @ 7:30am
Nov20 2012 @ 7:30am
