East Hampton Village officials will conduct a survey of stores on Main Street and Newtown Lane regarding the potential extension of the street parking limit from one to two hours, and ending that limit at 5 p.m. rather than the current 7 p.m.
Carrie Doyle, a trustee, told her colleagues on May 15 that the impetus for the discussion was a recent 5:30 p.m. dinner at which companions had to interrupt the meal to move their vehicles due to the one-hour parking limit. “You really can’t eat dinner, go to a movie, go to a store” within an hour, she said. “And a lot of the storekeepers have said, ‘Can we please have two-hour parking free on Newtown and Main Street?’ “ This would allow people to visit multiple stores, she said, “and actually drive some more traffic into our village. I just think it’s a little more user-friendly. . . . We want our village stores to be vibrant, and that’s why I suggested this.”
Mayor Jerry Larsen called the proposal “interesting,” but spoke of “the game that’s always played with moving your car every two hours” by employees of Main Street and Newtown Lane businesses to avoid parking tickets. “Historically, we’ve always had just the two-hour parking in the big parking lots,” the Reutershan and Schenck lots. Should the parking limit be extended to two hours on Main Street and Newtown Lane, “I think you’re going to create the same thing there,” the mayor said. “And I think the complaint we’re going to hear from the store owners or the store managers is that there’s no parking in front of their store because the employees have all filled up those parking spots.”
The mayor said he was not opposed to the proposal, but “I would like to do a survey of the stores that face Main Street and Newtown. . . . If we come back with overwhelming support, I think we should do what the store owners want us to do.”
Ms. Doyle agreed. The long-term parking lot has just been renovated and spaces added, she said, “so I think that’ll be a lot more attractive to people who work in the stores to park there.”
Mr. Larsen said that prior to Ms. Doyle’s proposal, a common refrain of store owners has been a request that “we allow additional paid parking” so shoppers “could get their one hour for free and if somebody wants to stay longer, they could just buy the extra time, which would solve that problem and also solve the problem with people parking for two hours and moving their car and re-parking for two hours, because if you’re an employee working in one of these stores, I don’t think you’re going to pay for the parking.”
The mayor said that street parking limits are enforced until 5 p.m. despite the posted 7 p.m. end time. “Why don’t we reflect what we actually enforce to what the signs say?” he asked. He asked Village Police Chief Jeffrey Erickson for his opinion. “Let’s make it all 5,” the mayor said, “because we don’t do any of the enforcement at night. If we stop it at 5 o’clock, it makes sense.”
