State legislature approves permit parking for P.C.’s Washington Park neighborhood
August 15, 2024 at 2:21 a.m.
The Village of Port Chester is on its way to being able to implement a residential parking system in the Washington Park neighborhood to make it easier for residents to find a place to park on the street near where they live.
Addressing an issue that exists in many sections of the village, Deputy Mayor Phil Dorazio hopes to start in Washington Park and branch out from there in the future.
To even get to this point, village officials had to petition state legislators to introduce bills in the Senate and Assembly to allow permit parking for residents in this neighborhood.
“Residential permit parking legislation goes back many decades,” said Assemblyman Steve Otis, who represents Port Chester in the State Assembly. “Municipalities in Westchester have taken advantage. All public streets are accessible to the general public. To set up a residential parking system, they need special legislation to do that. Usually there is a particular need articulated such as outside vehicles coming into neighborhoods so residents can’t park. The general rule is streets are available to everybody. A municipality can make a request based upon parameters the state provides. As in this case, the municipality has to provide some statistical analysis. They are not granted automatically.”
At the July 1 Port Chester Board of Trustees meeting, Dorazio thanked Otis and State Senator Shelley Mayer for their help in introducing and getting the required bills passed during the legislative session that ended in June.
“Now we have to figure out how to implement it,” he said on July 1.
“We’re a community that should have neighborhood parking permits,” said Dorazio on July 31 when asked to give some background on the process. “They won’t allow us to do the whole village at once. We have too many people and so much parking and so much overcrowding that people who don’t have access to the driveway have to park four or five blocks away.”
“If parking permits work, we can do another section of the village and hopefully eventually do the whole village,” added Dorazio. But only if state legislation is approved to do so.
“Normally they want it done around the train station or schools,” Dorazio continued. He said he, Trustee Joan Grangenois-Thomas, Mayor Luis Marino, Trustee Juliana Alzate, Village Manager Stuart Rabin, Planning Director Greg Cutler, Assistant Planning Director Curt LaValla and former Village Attorney Anthony Cerreto showed the state legislators the need during a trip to Albany, and they bought into it.
“If there is any village in the state that has a need, the need is definitely in Port Chester,” Otis told the village officials.
Dorazio said a survey was done that found there are 1,400 parking spaces available in Washington Park and 111% of those spaces were being used during nighttime hours. “That means people were parking in front of fire hydrants, in front of driveways, etc., because there is a need.”
“A permit may ease the need in this neighborhood,” said Dorazio. “If it doesn’t work, we can always abandon it.”
His feeling, at least, is that a permit is going to be very inexpensive. In discussions with other board members, “we’ve talked anywhere from free to $100 a year. We haven’t set a number. We don’t want to burden our residents with another fee. It’s not going to cost us much in labor and office time to get this done, so it’s a good opportunity.”
Otis explained his and Mayer’s role in getting the bills through the Assembly and Senate.
“The request came from the Port Chester village board and generally the process in this case is they make a general request. They have to define what streets they want included. That is provided to our transportation committee. If the bill passes muster, it makes the case for the bill to make it out, and it passed both houses of the state legislature—the Senate and Assembly.”
“More broadly, there is a problem of finding parking spaces in Port Chester, and the village has sought to crack down on commercial vehicles in residential areas,” Otis extrapolated.
“This is not a new issue in Port Chester,” the Assemblyman added. “I’ve dealt with this when I was counsel chief of staff for State Senator Suzi Oppenheimer. It goes back to at least the 1990s.”
Similar state bills allowing residential parking permits have been passed for other Westchester municipalities. “Mamaroneck has some streets, there are some streets in Bronxville near a school,” Otis enumerated. “Other communities have this in Westchester, but it is on a case-by-case basis, and it has to be a defined community, often around areas near a train station, near a school, someplace where there is a draw to take away parking from people who live on those streets.”
“The goal of this kind of system is to make sure local residents are able to park in their neighborhood,” Otis stressed. The same goal Port Chester officials are striving for.
What convinced Port Chester’s state legislators to help get these bills passed?
“Port Chester has a dire need for parking in many of its neighborhoods,” said Otis. “This is a remedy used in other municipalities and it has worked.” In addition, “Senator Mayer and I generally support home rule requests.”
Not yet signed by the governor
While the bills permitting a residential parking system in Washington Park passed the state legislature, they have not yet been signed by Governor Kathy Hochul.
“We finished the session in June,” Otis illuminated. “The hundreds of bills passed get sent to the governor over the last six months of the year. Once it’s signed by the governor, it falls back on the lap of the village to actually implement it. The state legislation is the authorization which then goes to the municipality for implementation.”
“We showed the need,” said Dorazio. “I’m very confident it will get signed. In the meantime, we are working behind the scenes to find the best way to get it done. I believe this is something that is going to help the village and help this neighborhood. This neighborhood has the most crowded school in the village. I’m over there every day, and during the school year, that neighborhood is dangerous.” He referred to John F. Kennedy Elementary School. “With this permitting and a little more police presence, and some cooperation from the school, we can get this neighborhood fixed and hopefully move on to the next one.”
“If the bill is signed, generally this goes back to the village and the village will hear from residents,” Otis explained. “They have to pass a local law and have comments from the public which may affect how they proceed.”
In fact, the last paragraph of both the Assembly and Senate bills states: “No ordinance shall be adopted pursuant to this section until a public hearing thereon has been had in the same manner as required for public hearings on a local law pursuant to the municipal home rule law.”
The area covered by the approved residential parking permit system, as stated in Assembly Bill 9963 and Senate Bill 9043, is generally bounded by Franklin Street to South Regent Street, running northerly on South Regent Street to Westchester Avenue, running easterly on Westchester Avenue to Pearl Street, running southerly on Pearl Street to Boston Post Road.
The village officials who went to Albany “drew the map and went over the language 15 times to make sure it was right,” said Dorazio.
Permit parking could benefit
Fox Commons residents
A handful of residents of the Fox Commons condominiums off Fox Island Road spoke at the Aug. 5 Board of Trustees meeting about non-residents parking on Nella Way, a public street within the development.
“In our bylaws, that parking is recognized as ours,” said a member of the Fox Commons Community Board. “There is some conflict there.”
Village officials and the Port Chester Traffic Commission are studying the issue and attempting to come up with a solution.
“We are more than happy to go look at the site plan and see if there is anything we are missing,” said Village Manager Stuart Rabin. “Our understanding is those are public spaces. We’ve painted those handicapped spaces and touched up those lines. If they are public spaces, there is no deal that can trump that.”
Permit parking, which again would require state legislation, might work on this street as well.
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