White River Junction
The town-owned plot of land that includes the former American Legion parking lot off South Main Street is far larger than had previously been supposed — 7.75 acres — and actually extends nearly all the way back to a mobile home park on Walsh Avenue.
While much of the land is on a hillside that would make development difficult, town officials now think that they can use a low retaining wall to create a new parking lot that could hold between 75 and 100 parking spots.
When they heard the news during a recent meeting, Selectboard members gave Morris a brief round of applause.
“If that could be developed, we could save two or three million dollars,” Selectboard Chairman Dick Grassi said.
Town staff members have described municipal-owned parking spaces as capped at 368.
In a September presentation to the Selectboard, a steering committee that was led by the Hartford Planning and Development Department recommended the town take various costly measures to cope with the parking pressure created by a spate of development in the downtown area. The presentation was part of a $20,000 study conducted by RSG and Vital Communities, and commissioned by the town.
Long-term recommendations included the building of a parking garage on the American Legion parking lot, and creating partnerships that would allow the public to make use of more than 600 privately owned parking spots in the vicinity.
Short-term recommendations included installing parking meters and a parking kiosk to help turn over prime parking spots on and along Main Street.
Town Manager Leo Pullar said the revelation about the town-owned property throws those recommendations into question.
“I would say, without talking to anybody, that it changes the dynamic of the whole discussion,” Pullar said.
Pullar, who came to the town just last year, said he could not answer how the town overlooked the parcel in previous years.
The town purchased the land in 1947 for $16,000, but the size of the plot had never come up during years of analysis of the town’s parking resources.
“It makes you ask ‘why,’ ” he said. “I don’t disagree with that.”
Morris said that after hearing the presentation from the steering committee members, he drove to the downtown area to get a better feel for the problems that they described.
“I went down and looked around,” he said. “I remember as a kid, that was all a sand embankment. We used to climb up the embankment to see who could get the highest on it. I saw it and said, ‘I wonder how far back we own.’ ”
Morris put that question to Pullar, who this summer had undertaken his own effort to do a blanket assessment of the 108 town- and school-owned properties. So when Morris called him, Pullar was able to look up the boundaries of the property on an entry in a three-ring binder on his desk.
Pullar next walked the property with Highway Superintendent Allyn Ricker, and said that their initial assessment suggests that Morris is on to something.
“That’s quite a savings,” Pullar said. “It’s not a big monolithic parking garage.”
The development could take some small amount of pressure off of the town’s budget talks, which kicked off recently with a long list of capital improvements that department heads have presented for evaluation and review.
Pullar said that the next step will be to test the soil at the South Main Street property to see whether there are contamination concerns that would hinder development.
If all goes well, he said, the town could prepare the site next summer, and lay asphalt next fall.
Pullar said Morris’ solution for the parking conundrum might prove the value of the oft-used maxim that problems can be solved by thinking outside of the box.
“I think we just maybe didn’t have the aperture open wide enough to see that in the past,” he said. “That wasn’t the task. The task wasn’t to find more parking, but to help solve this parking problem. We probably took a narrow view.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.