CIRCLEVILLE – The Circleville Mayor Don Mcllroy wants to challenge downtown business owners to make the decision on angled parking. City council during a recent council meeting suggested that parking in downtown and parking on the streets is the responsibility of the administration, not really council.
“I want to have buy-in from every business owner downtown to figure out if this is a good idea to have angled parking downtown. I don’t want this to be a decision done by this administration, and I want this decision made by downtown business and City Council, to make sure this is the best idea for our city.”
According to Circleville DBA, there are a total of 400 parking spots in the downtown area.
The proposal would change the straight parking we currently have now along Court street to angled parking from about Ted Lewis park to Everts building, essentially doubling the parking in the area. That proposal came from two downtown business owners, Tony Jankiewicz (Economic Development Vice-Chair for Uptown Circleville), and Paul Johnson ERA.
The Mayor said there are positives to doing this but also negatives. One challenge would be that it would turn Court Street to a three-lane road downtown, with a North and South lane and a turn lane only, but it could increase parking to almost double the parking spots. He also said that a lot of downtown business owners park in spaces that take up downtown parking, where there are two-hour limits, but they are not regularly enforced.
“There is a lot to look into to try to fix the downtown parking issues, and we want to challenge everyone to help come up with that solution,” said the Mayor. “We shouldn’t be the decision-makers on this; it should come from stakeholders and people who are involved in Downtown Circleville.”
The Mayor has set a meeting on September 12, 2019 6 pm at Watt Street backroom for all downtown merchants, Chamber of Commerce, Visitors Bureau, and city council members if they want to come.
“I really want to be transparent with this, said the Mayor, is this angled parking the best way to go. I already have one merchant that has already said that we have enough parking downtown. So the merchants need to have that conversation to figure out how they feel.”
Additionally, the Mayor wants to clean up the downtown signage and maybe to have signs that say additional parking to point towards the back parking lots that are available downtown.
The Mayor also spoke of additional parking lot areas that could be developed with funding, and that funding could come from establishing a DRD (Downtown Revitalization District) in the downtown area. “A DRD would capture additional revenue from new developments like Kingston Bank.”
