As if a fly on the wall at the Downtown Plan Steering workgroup meeting, I listened last night to the minutes from a couple days ago.
“Why do I torture myself?” I mumbled and stumbled over to my rather expensive German coffee maker. “It’s what I know, downtown stuff/coffee!” I answered myself with thoughts to the sound of compressed air infusing pure H2O into the finely ground, dark espresso beans recently purchased at Trader Joe’s.
Above the hissing sound came the shrill of the meeting getting underway, I knew it was going to be a long night, Lord have mercy on my poor beaten soul.
But enough about me, let’s get to the machinations….
First things first: Definitions and language meanings:
New plan for downtown = horrible idea
Implementation = screw everything up and ruin downtown
Phase tweek = changing order of unfolding calamity
All humor aside I was actually impressed, I think they’ve been reading “The Green”, with myself.
Some weeks ago I had mentioned in my blog about downtown that the new downtown plan had come up with nothing whatsoever anything to do with the actual frequent flooding of the area in question. I had mentioned that when the “2020” committee was originally seeking the hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay an outside Planning & Zoning firm, they had specified flooding as one of their primary reasons why “we” needed a new plan. However, a few weeks ago when the outside P&Z company was making “their” penultimate draft presentation on the matter their man said there was nothing that could be done about flooding, and then he moved on to something else.
Now tonight, or 2 mornings ago their time, they immediately launched into a huge discussion on how they might be able to amplify some statement of reference to the matter, of flooding. So obviously someone read the blog and now they were trying to cover their tracks!
Unfortunately they were only concerned with adding language of some sort, that they had yet to determine, to their forthcoming plan. They weren’t actually discussing ways to deal with flooding, only with ways to address the subject with language. Morley Boyd, of course, pointed out that this was unethical. Dewey J. Loselle said that he had read a report about flooding downtown from ten years ago and he couldn’t remember the details but they could just ‘dig that old study up’ and reference that in the new plan. Wow, he is efficient at operations!
This portion of the meeting ended with the outside P&Z guy saying he would come up with something or another about what some other town had done. Their guy is at least professional, give him that. I’m sure if he was designing a town from scratch it would be a veritable utopia. Unfortunately Westport is totally unique in many, many ways, which is lost to him, and already built, a utopia.
Bottom line: The flooding issue was used as part of the urgent need to re-plan downtown but once they got their money for the outside P&Z firm it really is just some “language” they have to cover their arss on, only because I or Morly brought it up.
The next thing they did was read a letter from the president of the Downtown Merchants Association, Steve Desloge, stating that he couldn’t make the meeting but that a parking structure at Baldwin should be the first part of any plan. By the end of the meeting many in the room agreed that the parking structure at Baldwin was the 800LB elephant in the room(my language).
My friends, I don’t want to come off as some great smart ass guy but this is what I have been saying for 3 and-a-half years. OMG, how dumb and out of touch can these people be. They probably look at me like I’m crazy. But my friends parking is the only “issue” downtown and they have spent 3 and-a-half years avoiding the issue as I have carefully laid it out over the course of 350 odd essays.
So, I guess they finally figured it out. You can’t do anything downtown until you solve the issue. It’s not just because I say so, it’s because much smarter people than myself have been mulling over the issue for decades, certainly much smarter people than…..I won’t say out of kindness.
There are other reasons why parking has to be solved before anything can happen. I’ll give you a legal reason; most building owners downtown don’t have parking lots so they rely %100 on town-owned parking lots. In fact, the building owners paid for and built Parker Harding Plaza! It has been proven that the Parker Harding and Baldwin lots were the reason for Westport becoming a shopping destination in the first place – hence downtown. The building owners were charged a fee for the building of the Baldwin lot.
Sometimes I think people assume I mention Sigrid Shultz all the time because I want to align myself with the famous Nazi hunter, you know – the lady who lived in the center of the Baldwin lot when I was a child, the lady who trained me and my mother to be ruthless investigative reporters, no – that’s not the reason, the reason is because she told me, Sigrid did, how and for what reason they were going to tare her house down when she was no longer alive……… IT WAS FOR PARKING!
So then decades later along comes the 2020, they want to do this, they want to that, they want to put a building over here – a building over there… And they mistakenly think they can solve whatever parking issues they might have as an afterthought.
That’s right – an afterthought.
Now they realize you can’t build a movie theater on Main Street without taking away parking spaces from building owners who already paid for the spots. Now they realize that you can’t double the size of the library without adding parking. You can’t build a park at Parker Harding because removing even 1 space will have an adverse effect on the stores. You can’t eliminate the parking at Jesup Green because that lot is full everyday with paying customers. You just can’t do it!!!
Well, there is only one way……..the only way is to build a parking deck right on top of Sigrid’s, God rest her soul, house at Baldwin.
But my friends it gets much more nuanced than that, I’m just not sure the committee can handle the truth….should I go on?
The reason why I know this new downtown plan is doomed for failure is because the principals involved fail to give even a passing glance at reality. For instance: The ideas from the outside planning company all revolve around restricting the movement of cars – slowing them down at every little turn. They want to remove parking spots from every lot for walking paths. I was reading an article from the 70’s in the Westport News about how “pedestridization” was really just a bullshit excuse for developers – how people never had a problem walking around downtown – ever.
Now you would think that it is the walking that is the problem – as if, if we had five new crosswalks across the Post Road – and more stop-lights downtown everybody would park on the other side of the Post Road to go shopping. The reality is that traffic is the problem. One used to be able to park downtown – go to town hall – stop by the library – go to the Y – pick up some groceries – go to the post office – get lunch – walking all the time – then get in their car and go home. Now for each of these things you have to get in your car and drive around looking for a parking spot for each activity because they sold the Library – they sold the Post Office – they sold the Town Hall –they sold the Y. Their ideas will only make it worse!
I’m not going to mention that the new Levitt Pavilion looks like frickin Disneyland, but these people are out of their fricken minds with their “plans” — they make no sense.
As if putting a sidewalk along Myrtle Avenue is going to make any difference at all besides slowing down the traffic with their new “pedestrian bump outs.” This is my nightmare.
The reason people don’t exercise downtown is because we have a beach to do that at. Duh!
The only reason to go downtown now is to shop for expensive non-essenstial items, or at night to get dinner. Nobody walks to go shopping. You’re not going to be able to get people to ride their bikes around to go shopping for perfume – or diamonds.
Oh, and the Library wants a 50 million dollar auditorium!? But no, they don’t need to add parking because they won’t hold events when the Levitt is having an event – the Levitt is every night – a lot of sense that makes.
Oh, and Mellissa Kane says that she has been up at the RBA offices making last minute changes to the plan! What’s that all about? She says her changes only have to do with “Language”. Well my friends that all this downtown plan is — “Language”. There is no planning going on.
For the committee to take 3 years to finally figure out that they might have to deal with parking before anything else – “phase tweek” – at the last minute before the final, final, final draft is “composed” by Mellissa tells me that these people are just flying by the seats of their pants.
One more thing, check out the part when one of the committee member’s says, “there is no fence along the river!” and Mellissa says, “oh there will be.”
Is she like the downtown boss now?
So much for “access to the river”, I guess that was just BS language also…
If Mellissa Kane had her way we’d all be riding our bikes and car-pooling to Oscars, lol
P.S. one more thing, the reason the fence along the river came up: I had blogged about how there was nothing for kids in the new downtown plan — back in late November(after they had completed their “research”), “maybe they should build a jungle gym at Jesup Green or something”(my words).
Now magically, that is the centerpiece of their plan to eliminate all the parking from Jesup Green so they can have a playground. But if you have a playground near the river you need a fence(so they say). My idea was not to have any fences in front of the river — my idea was just to have a jungle gym or something.
And it was my idea that the parking deck at Baldwin would have to go before anything else, so at least I am getting a widespread readership with the planners. Also I had said a few weeks ago that the Library needs to add parking if they want to double in size, and this point was reaffirmed by Larry Bradley(P&Z Director) at the meeting. over and out…