FARMINGTON — Selectmen Tuesday night, Sept. 12, voted for the Parking Committee to review the possibility of changing parking, come up with great new ideas for the downtown area.
“The parking has been challenging for my crew and for customers, too,” Wendell Olmsted, manager of Renys: A Maine Adventure on Broadway, said. He came before the board to see if there might be options to improve parking “for all the people who are working in this area and customers. It’s two-hour parking on Broadway and Main Street.”
The parking lot behind Renys is always full, it is first come, first served, Olmsted noted. “I have employees who can’t walk very far and sometimes they are restricted,” he stated. “I have been told you can walk from the movie theater. My employees are not going to walk from there.”
Suggestions Olmsted mentioned were making all day parking available everywhere except Broadway and Main Street or setting up parking permits where people [employees and customers] could pay for a sticker to use in areas where parking is limited.
“Right now, if you consider two-hour parking, you can’t really do a lot of shopping and get something to eat,” Olmsted said. “I think that is kind of handcuffing us a little bit for all the businesses in the [downtown] area. I am looking to see if we can fix it to improve things for workers and more importantly for customers.”
Selectman Joshua Bell said the starting point would be to send it to the Parking Committee for review. “I know they have tweaked it a couple times,” he noted. The Church Street parking lot a couple of years ago, we tweaked that, worked out a deal with the county for Anson Street, he noted.
Origin employees take all of the Church Street parking, Olmsted said.
If parking were opened up downtown, University of Maine Farmington students could be parking there when school was in session, Bell noted. The idea of tags has been thrown out in the past, there are details that would have to be figured out, he said.
“I think we need to do something,” Olmsted stated. “It affects not just the workers but the customers. They can go to Walmart and park, not have to deal with limitations. We want them to come downtown and enjoy the downtown experience. I think there is a lot to offer around this area.”
There isn’t a house to buy and turn into a parking lot, which had been done in the past, Bell said.
Selectman Dennis O’Neil asked if anyone had done a count on how many employee cars there were downtown during the day.
Olmsted said he has 17 employees. Selectman Byron Staples estimated 100 in all.
“There is a bigger demand since 2019,” Police Chief Kenneth Charles noted. “I don’t want to put a target on Origin, but that’s a pretty substantial employment group. It is definitely worth revisiting [parking downtown].”
The Parking Committee will get together, meeting information shared with the businesses, Chair Matthew Smith said.
“I have been here 53 years and I have heard about [parking] for 52 of them,” he added.
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