Public Participation

Transcript (~34 min @ 6:45)

Speakers identified by voice; unnamed voices are numbered within this recording. Auto-caption text — verify against the video.

▶ 6:48 Speaker 3: Is there a motion?

▶ 6:49 Speaker 1: Motion to open the floor for public presentation.

▶ 6:51 Peter D. Mortimer: Second. Alderman Byrd has made a motion to open the floor for public participation, said motion was seconded by Alderman Forbes. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Hearing none, public participation is now open. And we would welcome any members of the public here present who would like to come forward and comment or ask questions about any order on tonight's appropriations agenda. to tonight's appropriations agenda. Your questions will not be answered directly at this time, but all of them in the course of our discussion and debate about any orders on the agenda. We'll be ready for your questions as the evening proceeds. So we are open if anybody would like to come forward.

▶ 7:36 Speaker 3: First we have Steve Trulli.

▶ 7:40 Peter D. Mortimer: Would you write your name and address there on the sheet, Mr. Trulli, please?

▶ 7:45 Speaker 4: Thank you.

▶ 7:56 Speaker 4: You're welcome, sir. I'm here in favor of buying the building behind Shaw's and tearing it down and creating 23 parking spaces. I think, as everybody knows, if they try to shop downtown, it's a challenge. I average probably two people, three people a day, complaining about parking. Back in March 13th, I wrote an article that was in the weekly news. I still have people months later walking up to me telling me they agree that parking is horrendous I've never had anybody tell me they disagree with that article it's the parking downtown is the lifeblood of downtown without parking we can't sell anything we can't pay our taxes that's that's a problem but if I I

▶ 8:52 Speaker 4: know it costs money it's a lot of money and there's a lot it's tough in a city to try to get money with the federal aid and the state aid going in reverse you've got Melrose is hot there's lots of people moving into Melrose they all have cars you've got downtown buildings going at ridiculous amounts of money I eat the Irish bakery at 1.7 million dollars they're gonna tear it down for second floor on it and they're going to go back to that little uh highway metal thing there and that's going to eat up six or seven more parking spaces that's theirs they can do it cvs did it they took up 10 11 parking spaces when they expanded don stead at the gold coin stamp shop he went out back and he took his parking spaces and he built on it the more that happens the less

▶ 9:48 Speaker 4: parking spaces there are um since fidelity went in and fidelity is about 500 of those apartments are in melrose it's easily i try to count them all up all the different apartment buildings conversions condos etc that have been built and are being built at this time 94 down on washington street across the street there's hundreds i don't even know how many are there there's some on tremont street on and on we keep bringing more people in the morrows which is a a good thing it's roughly around 1,500 units easily 1,500 units since fidelity went in if every one of those units has one car just think of them all trying to shop downtown just 1,500 of them forget everybody else is here but excise tax excise tax is collected on every one of those cars and my knowledge is excise tax is to be used for streets and road repair sidewalks possibly parking lots possibly parking garage if every one of those 1,500 cars paid an average of $300 that's almost a half a million extra dollars a year that no one budgeted for no new was coming it's coming because of economics and all I'm asking is that we buy that building we tear it down we had 23 more parking spaces and we look to set up a fund that could continue to do that continue to look at properties on the on the very edges of parking spaces that we can get one way or another it's an investment in downtown you ask us for an override to invest in schools well people's property values are based on in my eyes two things they're downtown in their education and we have to spend money on both as a city I happen to be reading this article that was written in 1920 and it said Main Street Melrose by the light in 1880s was a prosperous principal thoroughfare with public transportation by horse, cars and after, that's it, after 1887, trolleys and after 1892, private vehicles. Parking was already a problem. Now this is going back to 1800. The alderman passed an order, number 1900, forbidding the tethering of horses to trees and bushes because there was no place else to tie them. Now we're talking about horses, now we're talking about cars. It's getting bad. I see people going across main street in the wrong way get on the other side because they see a parking space over there and now they're facing the wrong way in the wrong side of the street stop bucks the people go stop us think they own eastman place they're constantly parking there so it's a small little some people think it's a lot of money i think it's a small little bit of money to start to to help parking downtown i mean i can't i just went up on some of my rents because our taxes are going up the mayor talks about and i think that was that same newspaper about helping downtown thrive and four paragraphs later talks about raising the commercial taxes because we're lower than most cities around you can't have it both ways you can't have downtown thrive if you keep putting a burden on the people who own the buildings who then have to raise their their rent structure and then those people are telling you i had you know psychologists i had two people not show up today they couldn't find a place to park this is the reality of downtown so that's all I came to say I mean if you go back to the 1980s when Greenwood and Gately and Cerritani spent $20,000 of their own money I'm not sure how many of you seen that report I have one under lock and key they came out and said at the end because of all the cars parked all day and unsupervised it was five hundred and sixty one thousand missed trips a year to downtown think about 200 000 of them each one spending maybe 25 dollars on each trip how much money that would bring downtown and there's another article which i think i forgot to bring here but it was written in a

▶ 13:40 Speaker 4: hardware magazine that for every thousand dollars spent in a big box store or a mall there's 111 dollars might come back to the community usually it goes to nationwide things but for every thousand dollars spent downtown in a little time like ours it's over 200 something dollars comes back to the city in one way or form boy scouts baseball team kids working at stores making money then spending their money adults working in stores downtown et cetera et cetera and even people who own the business spending their money in other businesses so i'm just looking for the city to support us not just for this one parking lot but to come up with a game plan to continue to do things like this a parking garage would be unbelievable I'm not sure how people feel about that and I'm not sure we even put it put it but you know something to look forward in the in the future thank you thank you very much mr.

▶ 14:39 Peter D. Mortimer: truly any other members of the public please hi good evening please state your

▶ 14:47 Peter D. Mortimer: name and record and name and address for the record please sure my name is

▶ 14:51 Speaker 1: Rebecca Baraldi and I own a business at 538 Main Street in Melrose right over here and I also wanted to show support for the concept of additional parking in downtown Melrose Steve put everything very eloquently and I'll try not to repeat a lot of his points but Melrose has a very a very loyal and strong customer base but Melrose also has customers from outside of the immediate community as well I have regular customers that come from Peabody and Revere and other communities that surround the Melrose area and one of the most frequent comments I get is geez I would come here more often except I can't find parking and we definitely hear that from residents within the town as well it's interesting he brought up excise tax and I was going to bring that up as well and I wasn't even thinking in terms of motor vehicles I don't know about all businesses but my business I pay excise tax on every particular item

▶ 15:56 Speaker 1: that I bring in I pay an excise tax on it and that goes to the community so the more customers that actually come into the store the more money that I'm spending and giving back to the community so that's also I think a very interesting point I think that Mowers is a very desirable community in the past oh I don't know five six seven years it's come up on the top ten lists of communities to live in outside of Boston and I think by adding additional parking as Steve pointed out it enhances your downtown walking area Mowers is one of the last communities that still has a downtown area where people can park their car and walk to multiple businesses it's win-win you're making your downtown area more accessible to its consumers you're making which in turn makes the businesses more successful which in turn makes the community more desirable for people to come in and that makes you as he pointed out makes your house prices your house prices continue to go up and it keeps Melrose desirable I truly can't think of a detriment to adding additional parking spaces especially in the location that's being suggested I don't know if as a parking garage as was mentioned I don't know if something like that would be feasible but I do think it's something that the town surely needs should seriously consider and I hope that you take our thoughts into consideration so thank you very much for your time thank you rebecca good evening connor how

▶ 17:43 Peter D. Mortimer: are you tonight i'm very well how are you guys thank you please uh put your address on the ledger

▶ 17:55 Speaker 5: sheet good evening my name is conor mcguire and i live in the neighborhood where this proposed parking lot is going to go i'm at 4 cherry street which is actually just adjacent to the intersection there um i am i've been in the city for over 30 years i've owned a home here for you know the last eight or nine years or so um i've been active on different boards in the uh in committees on the city trying to make mellows you know it was a great place to grow up it's a great place to buy house and live here and raise my family and i actively volunteer to continue to make it a great place i agree with many of the comments that the previous two speakers had regarding making continuing to make Mars a nicer better place I disagree entirely with the approach that they're taking I hadn't heard the article that was read before about not tying horses to trees because of the congestion and I think that that point may be unintentionally proved a point that I was hoping to make tonight which is the traffic in parking is always a problem and adding parking spots in this way is not a smart way to deal with this this problem that we're having there is a congestion issue with that parking lot and as the mayor even pointed out I found out about this in the Free Press article that was published last week and the mayor mentions that there are other strategies regarding maybe employee parking maybe having them park in the more remote lots or behind City Hall because the peak times for shopping downtown maybe differ from the lots on Berwick or you know behind Puppuccinos or over by in City hall we've actually had in Melrose there's been professional consultants do traffic studies and parking studies and they found that there was no lack of parking all the peak times that were addressed they discovered there were ample available lots parking spots in lots just not in the necessarily high high frequency zones so I think it's a lack of education about where the where the spots are how the employees are actually parking where they're parking There are many solutions that don't involve, you know, a large expenditure of money that you're, you know, it's, I feel like it's almost hypocritical, the city is saying, we don't have enough money, we want this override, yet they're going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a commercial property, which by the way, when that building's sold, would be a asset for the city because you're going to be taxing it and getting thousands of dollars from that commercial property. And by purchasing it, you're turning it into a liability. all the money that you are borrowing you lose the actual tax revenue from the parcel since the city now owns it so you're taking something that's actually adding you know money to the city coffer which is a commercial property and turning it into a liability which you know and then asking for an override it just seems very very inconsistent and again I've supported many of the projects that happen around town so this is this is you know I'm not against development in this way in general I have a couple notes here and look and see um you know again i live in the neighborhood it's it's actually going to have a very negative impact directly on the neighborhood it's you know one of the things that people love about downtown and the fact that you can park and visit multiple businesses well taking that lot away is taking a business away and i heard suggested here tonight we should keep doing this keep expanding the parking lot like this there's no end to that you just you won't you know the mollification of melrose is not going to make it a nicer place you know the ample parking you know no no great city is known for having excellent parking it's the it's the things that are there that are not parking that make it worth visiting um and considering that the professional study was done that says that there's not a lack of parking i don't see how it makes sense to actually spend money to to have the city set up to lose the money um you know 90 of the time or more i live in the neighborhood i walk around here constantly i shop downtown i you know frequent the businesses that we're talking about tonight you know 90 of the time or more there's ample parking you walk through there there's a few peak times during the day where there's an issue and there's other ways that that can be dealt with that don't involve a huge capital cost and burdening the taxpayers of the city and a loss of you know the law firm that's there now you know what's the next business is going to come in there that might be another asset for the city that makes meller's a great place to live no one's going to say oh there's 23 more spots let's go hang out in the parking lot down there that's great you know not to mention the air pollution in the neighborhood you know You know, this is not just a commercial zone. This is a residential neighborhood also. There's apartment buildings down there. There's people, you know, like myself and my family and my, you know, my young child and other families. There's a daycare there. You know, the more cars that are down there, in that respect, just adds, you know, to a poor air quality. And there's this well-known factor of induced demand. You know, they've done highway expansion projects across the country. They've done parking lot expansions across all these cities in the country. what ends up happening is right now people that might carpool down here you'd have the same number of people maybe going down to the restaurant you make more parking spots now instead of me swinging by my friend Mike's I was to pick him up to go eat you know eat dinner you know now we'll both drive instead so you still have you know a patron count that's about the same but you have this induced demand because it's bigger I grew up here and before the big dig it took you know between a half an hour and an hour to get into the city well they did this huge project and it still takes a half an hour to an hour to get in the city it's just the expansion of these projects it's it's it's old-school thinking this is like 1960s 70s 80s thinking of how to like fix a problem there's been you know a great book which prior to this being a topic it's a 700 page book about traffic and free parking and I read that because this stuff interests me is I don't know if anybody else here has read the the the cost of free parking by Donald Shoup who's the UCLA professor they have these great programs in San Francisco they're adopting because that's another congested area that they said you know we have a parking problem what are we gonna do and I'd be happy to talk with any about the solutions that are in that book I can consolidate it down a little bit for you from the 700 pages to some of the takeaways but the there are ways to deal with this you know and like you

▶ 24:01 Speaker 5: know the real issue is that if people expect ubiquitous free parking that guts and destroy cities like that is that is a problem never mind if you're taking away a potential business from the city and another amenity that we could have there are ways that you can like price correct you know and I know they used to be meters on Main Street and I know nobody wants to hear about paid parking but personally if I was a waiter downtown and there's been studies show this is true that if if somebody's willing to pay for parking let's say hypothetically you put meters on main street right so the premium spots are there and maybe the maybe the free parking is in the less used places like the back of the parking lot or behind city hall well all of a sudden you know if you're looking for parking and you're desperate to shop i'll pay a quarter i'll pay 50 cents i'll pay a dollar what you know whatever the market rate is so that i can park right so if you can't find a parking spot you don't have a parking problem you have a pricing problem you're taking something that you know that my point about the waiter if there's a if there's a parking spot here for a dollar and that guy will drive around for half an hour to looking for a free spot the clients that are willing to pay the quarter the 50 cents for a parking spot they're gonna go into the stores and they spend more money per trip they they tip better they do all the things you want so the businesses I haven't discussed this with any of the people in chamber of commerce in the business but this this data and I mentioned the book before there's tons of research talking about if you price the parking appropriately the businesses benefit from that price correction because all of a sudden the people that are willing to spend short money to get a convenient parking spot are walking into your store buying the products spending willingly but also not sitting there for three hours because they know they have to keep feeding the meter so they're efficient and they don't park the car for longer than they need to and then another client can come in and person can use it and for um the way they do it in san francisco is they price correct it so that there's essentially there's always a spot available on the block so if the if the block is always full that means the price is too low and if the block is more than you know one or two spots empty that means it's too high and they do a price correction every month to get it to kind of get a sweet spot and they let people figure out what the appropriate rate is to park um and again it benefits the businesses which again i'm a huge advocate for the business is a small business i shop at these stores i'm not anti their business it's just the structure is not the proposed solution has been proven across the country to not be the right solution um i think i have one or two more notes here and then i'll move on um i mentioned the study that's been done that shows there's no no problem with it um the mayor's already mentioned remote employee parking you know the restaurants when they get crowded you know the city behind city hall is empty we could set up a valet service so that the restaurants have this nice valet service and people can have their cars carried back to the to the remote spot so they can eat conveniently and park conveniently i mean four hundred thousand dollars to buy this lot and rebuild it like you know the city could fund a valet service for i'm sure for for a while and maybe have it subsidized by the chamber of commerce for for you know an experiment or a trial run um you know that's that's a lot of money um that they could they could experiment with to solve this problem in a different way and still maintain a tax base of that property um there's essentially unlike the people that spoke earlier i see really no benefit to this unlike them who said they don't see a perceived benefit i mean a lack of benefits it's it's it's it's tying horses to trees like the guy said like it's the same problem you're going to put 23 spots in and people are still going to complain about the lack of parking it's just it's not going to fix it um i think that might be about it oh there was a restriping um study that was done as part of that survey in the survey i believe and only some of the measures were done to correct it the lot that's for sale now i know at least like two or three more spots might be able to fit because they have two driveways they have the city kimball court street and then there's the driveway that connects through i'm not sure that like you know if they have any legal right that the back of their property has to be an exit to the parking lot you know most properties have one driveway in and out so it seems like maybe that could get closed off when this property changes hands if there's some sort of grandfathering in there so that could benefit by maybe adding one or two spots using using the existing square footage more efficiently I know a parking garage would be very expensive but it would be the same type of idea of using the square foot efficiently which you know would include things like parking structures you know that that doesn't remove commercial uses on the perimeter which benefit the community and lastly you know again because I do sustainable design work and construction work for what I do you know do for a living and the news feeds that I have are talking about services like uber and autonomous cars that are being made by 2020 by by Tesla, by GM, by Ford, by Google. I mean, using a 1960s solution to a problem that probably won't be a problem in five or 10 or 20 years, it's going the wrong way. You know, I read that article and I felt like, I checked the date on the top of the paper, like is this really 2015 and they're talking about expansion of parking lots, and at the same time we're talking about driverless cars that will drop you off and you know, it seems like science fiction, but it's not. These things are happening. Nevada, Florida, Michigan, they've already approved autonomous vehicles on the roads. it's um it's really happening and I'm excited about that but I'm depressed to think that the city thinks that this is actually a good long-term solution and again no no great city is known for having abundant parking it has to be a place where people are willing to carpool or park a little remotely walk an extra block to get to a great a great city or a great downtown area and you know that's how the places that I typically visit if I travel and go on vacation or you know I don't just go places with strip malls because they get good parking you know I go places that have something worth walking to so I want I want the downtown area to still be a place worth walking to not just through thank you thank you very much anybody else wish you to be heard yes

▶ 29:51 Speaker 6: sir good evening Jim O'Loughlin 39 Lincoln Street Melrose I've received many compliments from friends and relatives about our downtown and I always brag that we're lucky that we don't have a main state highway running down through the middle of it I enjoy using our downtown and patronizing the local businesses and I support additional parking for retail tail purposes especially on a moderate scale like this but we don't have a state highway running down through the middle of the town and as a result a lot of traffic is getting pushed out onto residential streets and I can tell you Lincoln Street where I live a lot of that traffic is going 40 or 45 miles an hour it's becoming increasingly unsafe in the past month there's been three

▶ 30:45 Speaker 6: accidents within two blocks of my house two on Lincoln one on Upham one of the accidents on Lincoln Street left a skid mark a hundred feet long how fast is a car going to leave a skid mark a hundred feet long so from my perspective we We don't need anything that brings any more traffic into Melrose. Our residential streets were not designed or intended to handle the speed and volume that some of them are seeing. So as it pertains to this order, I have two requests. First, I'd like to understand what definitive and aggressive steps are being taken to make sure that these new spaces and all of the spaces in the municipal lots are not and will not be used by commuters medford has a terrible problem with this and i've heard complaints from our retailers from my perspective i don't want to see any more north shore commuters flying down my street because we provided them a free and convenient place to park second i'd like some assurance that these spaces will not be used to facilitate future residential developments in the downtown every unit of housing that comes into the city has the potential to put 20 car trips past my house every week and if not on my street on one of the dozen or so cut through streets throughout the city there's probably one in every ward

▶ 32:13 Speaker 6: i would not want to see the acquisition of this property exacerbating the already heavy volume of traffic that some of the residential streets are saying now i recognize that these are narrow

▶ 32:28 Speaker 6: comments on a narrow topic but they are indicative of a bigger picture problem and concern an apparent increase in traffic volume throughout the city to that end i was very pleased that we

▶ 32:42 Speaker 6: got funding to update the city's master plan i think a page one objective of that master plan should be a commitment to take aggressive steps to reduce the volume and speed of traffic in this city and to back that commitment up with resources thank you for the opportunity to express these concerns i support the acquisition of this property to provide for a moderate increase in retail parking but i would like to see some definitive steps taken to prevent additional traffic resulting from non-retail use thank you mr o'laughlin are there any other members of the

▶ 33:28 Peter D. Mortimer: public wishing to come forward to be heard please yes the gentleman who spoke third

▶ 33:44 Speaker 4: he lives very close to the neighborhood his parking lot is and if he lives that close he probably does walk downtown but a majority of people in morrows don't live that close it can't walk downtown our population greatest generation is larger every day in Melrose and they can't walk downtown it's not let's just come down to the facts we're just you know we're not in San Francisco we're in a tight New England town the survey that they just did that I think he's speaking about I think was flawed it wasn't done as good as the Cerritani survey it was done on a couple of days it doesn't say what days doesn't say what the weather was it could have been raining those days and sure there'll be plenty of parking spaces if it's pouring they don't tell you what the weather is it wasn't done in each different season seasons very downtown if you do it in August the place is empty everybody's down the Cape

▶ 34:48 Speaker 4: he talks about the building we're losing a retail building the building hasn't been used in three years in three years nobody's put an offer on that building except for me I wanted to buy and I didn't I couldn't they didn't want to come with my price it wasn't worth what they were asking right it's got a tremendous mold problem in that building so we're not losing a retail spot we're adding parking space let's let's just be realistic about that you can talk about all the studies in the world but until you stop putting all the studies here and we all get a chance to read them they don't mean anything you can talk

▶ 35:23 Speaker 4: about study study studies I agree with him people aren't efficient with their walking around downtown we've given them three hours now I think three hours is a long time even if you're having dinner three hours is a long time so maybe it was a number of different things we can do the mayor has been very nice to put me on the parking Commission I want to see if we can reduce that three hours back to the two hours I want to see some 20-minute zones we used to have them in couple of them disappeared they went to a half an hour we have we were renting parking spaces for people to park all day long for $250 a year when huntress and woody and a few other guys are getting a hundred and a quarter a month we should be at market rate a thousand or twelve hundred dollars I'd like to see that get up there make it worthwhile to us to have those guys if they want to park all day then that's what they have to pay to play and they should be directed where to park they should be directed to Berwick that's the only place they can park it behind City Hall I have eight or nine people who park all day with all day parking stickers behind Starbucks that's one-third of the entire parking lot tied up all day the nighttime parking and mr. Sena will agree with me when those people should all be in one spot if they want to have a place to park they should all be behind City Hall so his crew when it snows can plow all the rest of the parking lots without having to work around all these cars who just decide I'm gonna park here tonight then I'm gonna park over there cuz that's plowed but this isn't plowed my parking lot was a mess I was plowing myself there's a lot of things that we can do I know the traffic coming on Lincoln Street is just like the track up up the street we said that when the mall went in we said there's gonna be a lot of traffic going up Porter Street I'm up the street how are you gonna stop it this is a free country you know there's people who want to come to this town there's people building buildings in this town without these buildings he's 1,500 apartments plus we'd really be in dire straits for taxes so I guess we do have to find some way to live with that and as a retailer downtown and the person who owns a building downtown I want to have people more people to come downtown so they can shop and spend money and visit my tenants upstairs so they can make money and on and on and on

▶ 37:45 Speaker 6: all I want to say thank you if we're going to encourage people to come in from other cities to shop downtown we better get cops on the street to slow them down it's ridiculous thank you good evening

▶ 38:05 Speaker 1: how are you tonight my name is Ellen Hutchins I live on Florence Street and I just wanted to say that I support what's being said about a comprehensive plan beyond just the additional parking spaces I see some merit in the additional parking spaces but I want to note from the committee what exactly is going to be done to try to enforce the parking better so that there can be more turnover of spaces and the other reason that I'm here tonight is to really talk about community safety and a more visible police force I walk dogs every morning I walk for exercise and it's becoming less and less safe particularly crosswalks my alderman has provided me with data in terms of a real reduction in terms of revenue that's been brought in comparing the last two years for non parking violations it averages out to about $30 a day that's brought in when you divide it by 365 days so I want to know really why we're not having a much more visible police force and what can be done to really make this a safer place to walk and hopefully that will make it a little easier to park as well

▶ 39:21 Speaker 3: thank you thank you very much for your input I just want to add one

▶ 39:38 Speaker 5: clarification so I did mention a bunch of studies that were done and many of the items in that again that 700 page book which is essentially studying itself is actually not just all theoretical they're based on real-world world examples and real projects that went with options like one that's being considered with adding parking versus other types of solutions that maybe set it up for higher turnover of spots and things like that so that the demand was it wasn't an induced demand situation so it wasn't all just theoretical and again I can talk about the satellite so it's very of that unless you want the details but it's not just theoretical it's actually cities across the country of

▶ 40:25 Peter D. Mortimer: very similar to our own thank you very much anybody else would like to speak at public participation I hear something from you alderman Burt like a motion to close we have a motion to close public participation from alderman back to my goal is to be seconded by alderman Burt all in favor please say aye any opposed Hearing none, public participation is now closed.

▶ 40:50 Speaker 3: First.