City Still Wants Parking Feedback After Open House

Melrose officials are still looking for more feedback from the public regarding parking downtown after holding an open house on Tuesday, with the aim of presenting possible strategies to improve downtown parking to the public in June.

Melrose City Planner Denise Gaffey said Tuesday's open house served as an informal "interactive forum" where residents and business owners could come in and mark up maps of the downtown area to show where their concerns about parking currently exist, and where they thought opportunities exist for improvements. The city also had a slide presentation running that Gaffey said will be uploaded to the city's website.

Residents and business owners can still weigh in, if they missed the open house, by taking the city's online survey, which Gaffey said will be kept online for the next several weeks.

"We had terrific response so far with the surveys—over 200 of them submitted online and then yesterday, we had a stack of them delivered in hard copy form (from the forum)," she said on Wednesday. "We've had businesses getting people to fill them out. We haven’t processed them yet, but so far it's a good response."

Prior to the open house, staff members from the city's Office of Planning and Community Development spent two straight days in city parking lots counting spaces and collecting data, Gaffey said. The city's usually packed seven municipal lots have 682 parking spaces in total.

The efforts stem from the state Department of Housing and Community Development awarding Melrose a $10,000 grant from for "technical assistance," which Gaffey earmarked for a parking study that also includes commercial districts near the Wyoming Hill and Cedar Park MBTA stations.

"What we’re going to do next is have an internal brainstorming session with our consultant (NelsonNygaard Consulting Associates) and our committee," Gaffey said, "to sort of debrief on the surveys and the parking counts. Then, we'll be working on some strategies we’ll be getting out to the public sometime in June."