Sound View Will Have Different Street Parking and Kiosks This Summer

The town of Old Lyme has big plans to revamp the Sound View beach area, with a new park, permanent public bathrooms, bike paths, and parking kiosks. But that's not going to happen this summer. 

Although the town has been awarded a grant that will cover 80 percent of the cost of this project, it's going to take time, and lots of public hearings, before any ground can be broken.

However, with plans in place and a vision in mind, the Board of Selectmen decided not to wait to implement at least one of the ideas: to install two parking kiosks on the street and redesign the parking spaces on Hartford Avenue to make the area safer this summer. 

Voters at last night's Town Meeting approved spending $27,300 to improve parking and install two kiosks on Hartford Avenue for on-street parking payments, as recommended by the Board of Selectmen.

About $2,300 of that will go to pay an engineer to reconfigure the street parking from parallel parking on both sides of Hartford Avenue to diagonal spaces on the west side of the street that, unlike the existing spaces, will meet Department of Transportation specifications.  

First Selectwoman Bonnie Reemsnyder said that although the town won't be able to use grant money for this, installing kiosks will make it much more convenient for visitors—who won't have to hunt for park rangers to pay to park as they did last year—and safer for the park rangers, who won't have to walk the street trying to collect parking fees in cash. 

The kiosks will allow the town to set and adjust street parking rates, and allow people to park for two hours at a time instead of paying to park all day if they aren't planning to stay that long. 

Last summer, amid much protesting from Sound View businesses, the town instituted paid street parking for the first time. The Board of Selectmen hope that installing parking kiosks will help ameliorate some of the areas of concern raised last year. Local business owners, however, turned out last night to voice objections to the distinct possibility of having fewer town parking spaces at Sound View. 

At the end of the meeting, though, the ayes had it. The Board of Selectmen is optimistic that the additional cost of installing parking kiosks will be offset by funds generated by people paying to park. Last summer, street parking added $36,000 to town coffers while the town's existing parking lot (which will remain unchanged this summer) brought in $89,500 in revenue to the town.