ATHOL — At the annual town meeting last month, voters took the advice of the Finance and Warrant Advisory Committee and passed over an article which called for a Parking Benefits District in downtown Athol. At the time, committee members felt there were too many questions that couldn’t be answered, were they to be raised by residents attending the meeting.
At its most recent meeting, the FWAC again voted to recommend an article to set up a PBD be passed over at the fall town meeting currently scheduled for Oct. 19, for the same reason.
Athol Planning and Development Director Eric Smith explained that the article calls on the town to adopt a section of Mass. General Law which allows for the establishment of a Parking Benefits District.
Smith said establishment of the district would allow funds collected from meters to be used specifically for the operation and maintenance of parking meters, “as well as for parking payment enforcement.”
Smith said some of what he and Athol’s Downtown Vitality Committee would like to do is, in part, based upon strategies adopted by the community of Arlington.
“They actually created a Parking Implementation Governance Committee,” he said. “We may want to adopt something a bit more informal than that moving forward, but essentially, in the first year, they budgeted $125,000 for the actual parking meters. And these were actually new meters in their downtown.”
Establishing the district, he went on, would also allow for development of plans to upgrade parking meters.
“Ever since the parking management plan was advertised in the newspaper and on Google, I can’t tell you how many proposals we’ve received,” he said. “You can use the district for such things as street cleaning or power washing of sidewalks. There are things that a parking district can do that you can’t do in the absence of Mass. General Law.”
“So, basically,” said committee Chair Ken Duffy, “this article would be the first step in the process, as opposed to automatically saying, ‘This year we’re going to use x-number of dollars, or whatever.
“When we first looked at this for the annual,” said Duffy, “I don’t think we had all the facts at the time. As it’s come out, this is more of an enabling article that begins the process of the town accepting this and then moving forward; being able to do different things based on the parking plan.
Duffy said the parking budget from FY15 to FY21 averages about $11,000 a year. Parking meter revenues, he said, were a bit “skewed” because meters didn’t accept coins for the last three months of FY20 due to the pandemic shutdown.
“That actually got deposited in July, which will count toward FY21,” said Duffy.
He also pointed out that a parking meter account exists, which currently holds a balance of $74,500.
“I don’t know what that is used for,” he said. “Right now, I’m a little confused on that. So, I don’t know how accessible that money is; what that money is doing.”
Duffy said he was concerned that, while passage of the article would enable the town to establish a PBD, there really are no details regarding its implementation.
“If we get through step one,” he said, “we need to figure out how we’re going to handle this, what the program is, who’s responsible. The concern I have right now is that, say we support this and it goes to the town meeting floor, there’s nothing behind this thing, yet.