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North Adams city council signs off on new plan for paid downtown event parking, new assistant city clerk, assistant IT director

A brutalist brick building sits under a blue sky.
Josh Landes
/
WAMC
North Adams City Hall.

The North Adams, Massachusetts city council has approved a new plan for paid downtown event parking, as well as two new city hall hires.

Mayor Jennifer Macksey’s proposal to charge city visitors for event parking was embraced by the city council when she introduced it over the summer.

City councilor Bryan Sapienza read the most recent draft of the bylaw at Tuesday night’s bimonthly meeting: “At non-city sponsored events with 2,000 or more attendees, locations shall be designated as event parking at a rate of $40 per day."

Macksey answered a question about the city’s ability to enforce the ordinance if faced with staffing issues in the key downtown parking lots in question.

“In immediate terms – i.e., before the snow flies – we have an ops plan where we have enough staff that we can handle St. Elizabeth's and Center Street," she said. "The goal is down the road to be able to automate the process, but we would still require some kind of oversight in both departments. So we want to get through this tourist season, and then we are looking at software and kiosks and apps and things like that as we move forward. But there still needs to be eyes in both lots, and we have an excellent plan established for our upcoming event with MASS MoCA.”

The FreshGrass festival, which draws thousands of bluegrass fans to the MASS MoCA campus, kicks off next Friday.

“Our hope is our long-term plan is to be more automated and make it more user-friendly," continued Macksey. "But we are committed to making this work because it's a good revenue source for us, and it also provides order in these parking lots when we have a lot of visitors.”

Macksey reiterated that the city has considered the needs of its residents and business owners in formulating its new monetized parking plan.

“Especially in the Center Street parking lot, we are going to attempt to shut off half of the parking lot and make that just open for customers for those businesses in that area and then sell the opposite side of the parking lot," she said. "All of the residents will have designated parking spaces on weekends or events that cause us to take over those parking lots. And that is also true in St. Elizabeth's. So we're very sensitive to the people who have pre-paid for parking and sometimes who are pushed out during these events.”

The mayor was asked how the city would determine if an event met the 2,000-attendee marker that would trigger the paid event parking ordinance.

“With the [MASS MoCA] events, we will be based off what their ticket sales are and what their projections are, and again, through the event planning process, which we're trying to expand in and tighten up through an ops plan," she answered. "But that's the data that we would collect during the process.”

Pressed on the city’s ability to communicate effectively with MASS MoCA, Macksey said North Adams is learning from past mistakes and attempting to fill gaps in its parking system.

“We've been focusing over the last couple of weeks of replacing signs," she said. "River Street, as I'm sure some of you have seen, is completely posted and then some. And we are working on the outlets that go out, the River Street, Houghton Street area as well as up to Williams Street. So we're focused on those areas. But it's not just around the [MASS MoCA] campus. Systemically, we've designated no parking in areas on streets, and the signs have either disappeared or have not put up. So we are taking an inventory of not only no parking signs, but stop signs, yield signs, those kinds of things.”

The council unanimously adopted the amended ordinance.

Macksey then explained her order calling for $44,500 to be transferred from the city’s Municipal Technology & Access grant for the hiring of a second assistant IT director.

“With everything that we have going on and the need to really up our game when it comes to technology infrastructure and security, I just thought because we had two very qualified applicants with different skill sets that this was an opportunity to add to our IT staff," said the mayor. "My hope is that at the end of this budget cycle, we would be able to return this money to the municipal access fund. But on the premise of transparency and working with the city council, and really sharing with the community as to what we're doing, I did not want to deficit spend the salary account even though the budget would stay in the positive. I just felt that it was an opportunity for us to disclose what our plans were with it, and to properly account for it.”

The plan received the unanimous backing of the council.

The meeting also saw the hiring of Tina Leonesio as Assistant City Clerk and the appointment of Patricia Flaherty to the Council on Aging.

Josh Landes has been WAMC's Berkshire Bureau Chief since February 2018, following stints at WBGO Newark and WFMU East Orange. A passionate advocate for Western Massachusetts, Landes was raised in Pittsfield and attended Hampshire College in Amherst, receiving his bachelor's in Ethnomusicology and Radio Production. His free time is spent with his cat Harry, experimental electronic music, and exploring the woods.
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