Irvington Ponders a Wholesale Revision of its Parking Rules

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March 2, 2016

by Barrett Seaman

Parking has sometimes been called (a bit facetiously) the third rail of Irvington politics. In a village where finding a parking space has been a headache for generations, a village that has had on its books since 2003 a comprehensive ban on any kind of parking structure, and a village that knows it needs more places than it has—for residents, shoppers and commuters—messing with the parking regulations could spell the end to an otherwise stellar political career.

And yet, the village Board of Trustees is poised to tiptoe down the tracks with a sweeping set of new regulations designed to correct some of the unintended consequences of the existing regulations, which have been cobbled together in bits and pieces over the years. No one can remember the last time the village government attempted a wholesale change in parking rules. Time will tell whether these new ones, if adopted, will create unintended consequences of their own.

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Currently, parking on predominantly commercial Main Street is limited to one hour. The mostly residential side streets allow up to six hours. Indeed, the six-hour limit applies to all residential streets throughout Irvington. Overnight parking is forbidden—on any village street.

There are 304 designated spaces for permitted commuters near the Metro North Station. The permits cost $570-a-year and there is currently a waitlist of a year or more. Irvington has one public parking lot, alongside the Aqueduct with 50 spaces, but only permitted residents may park there after 6 p.m.

The six-hour limit on side streets was intended to provide spaces for homeowners who didn’t have driveways or garages. In 2005, Don Marra, Village Manager at the time, won permission from New York State to issue Residential Parking Permits (at $25 annually) to get around a ban on overnight parking. Trouble was, when those permitted residents got home in the evening, many of the spaces were taken up by commuters who couldn’t find a spot near the station (or didn’t have a Metro North permit) and thought they could stretch six hours into nine or ten while working in the city.

Left out of the equation are the non-resident employees of Irvington’s Main Street stores, restaurants and offices. Nine-to-fivers can park up at the Aqueduct lot during the day, but a waiter or cook working nights at Wolfert’s Roost or La Chinita Poblana has got a problem after 6:00pm.

Onto this rocky terrain stepped Village Manager Larry Schopfer and Trustee Connie Kehoe, liaison to the downtown business district and a proponent of the village’s ongoing Streetscape Improvement Project. Over the past year, they consulted with business owners and in-town residents to hear their problems and search for solutions. In January, Schopfer laid out a tentative proposal and its rationale. In March, the board is expected to fine-tune a new set of regulations that will be the first significant change in a decade. The proposed plan would:

• Increase Main Street parking from the current one to two hours, with a few excepted 15-minute spaces. The goal is to encourage more shopping per visit and allow for more time in restaurants.

• Reduce the time allowed for parking on immediate side streets from the current six to two hours. This would discourage Metro North poachers but leave permit-owning residents unaffected. These limits would apply from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

• Eliminate the ban on overnight parking (8 p.m. to 8 a.m.) for both Main Street and its side streets. The goal here is to take the pressure off the Village’s one large public parking area by the Aqueduct for long-term parking needs in the upper Main Street area.

• Relax the Aqueduct rules to accommodate both non-residents and local business employees.

• Allow a certain number of Residential Parking Permits to be issued to some employees of local businesses. This too might take pressure off the Aqueduct lot and provide spaces for those late-working chefs and waiters.

To test reactions to the proposal, Schopfer, Kehoe and others are canvassing residents and business owners. The squishiest component is the selective issuance of Residential Permits to employees. The village must first ascertain how many fit that category and whether the number is large enough to clash with the interests of actual residents who feel they deserve first dibs on their own streets.

The last time Irvington took as comprehensive a look at parking was in the early 1990s, when then-Village Trustee Terry Masterson, crowned the “Parking Czar,” delved into the issue. “All my parking efforts were to increase supply,” he recalled. “I never dabbled in all the rules and regulations, so it’s great that this is being done.”

Now an administrator with the City of Northampton MA, Masterson warns: “The parking issues are the same here!!”

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