Group reviews parking needs
Saratoga Springs Mayor Joanne Yepsen’s parking task force is hard at work to find solutions to the city’s parking problems amid the start of the busy track season.
Chair of the parking task force Harvey Fox, owner of N. Fox Jewelers on Broadway, and vice-chair Mike Ingersoll of The LA Group, a local architecture firm, updated the city council on their findings at last week’s council meeting. The task force has been collecting data diligently over the last few months.
According to Fox, there are 1,300 spaces of public on-street parking in the city and 1,300 public off-street parking spaces. Among the private sector, there are 4,250 spaces. This is nearly 7,000 spaces for parking in the city.
These numbers do not include the planned City Center parking garage to be built on the High Rock Avenue lot. Ingersoll said that the task force did not know the specifics of the lease and assumed the City Center would manage the facility on its own.
The main hope for the task force is that the city council creates an office of management for parking to manage these 7,000 spaces efficiently. Fox said that he’s been encountered by numerous individuals who’ve stated they took close to half an hour to find parking. Fox said that this management commission would help the flow of traffic in decreasing the amount of drivers circling downtown to find a space to park.
Another option is to recruit, with no additional cost to the city, professional management companies to conduct studies in the city. They have reached out to areas such as Burlington, Vt, Ithaca, NY, Newport, Rhode Island, and Port Smith, NH to get information on this. Mayor Yepsen said that Burlington was able to increase their spaces by 20 percent by just restructuring and remanaging them.
“I think a professional man-
agement company might be able to provide some consistency and look at this as something that needs to be done on a permanent, full-time basis,” said Public Safety Commissioner Christian Mathiesen. “There are a lot of parking resources in the city and they could be managed in a more effective way than what’s being done.”
Fox said that these proposals have support from the Saratoga Chamber of Commerce, Sustainable Saratoga, Saratoga Convention Tourism Bureau and the Downtown Business Association. Members of these organizations would be on the management commission.
“I felt it was very important that the business community take the lead on this,” said Mayor Yepsen. “We now need to move forward with an organization and a structure that can take these ideas to the next level. So we do need to work together as council to fix these problems and then find long-term solutions as well.”