Sodano: Committee plans for city’s parking growth
Consultant will next present recommendations to public and council
Editor, Asbury Park Sun,
Regarding your recent articles about the parking challenges in the city, a small group of concerned citizens has been working behind the scene for the past year — on their own time — to plan for the management of parking growth in all three main sections of Asbury Park. Monthly meetings and discussions have been held to approach the problem that, quite frankly, the city has not been able to do more than put a bandage on over the recent growth years.
The Parking Advisory Committee encouraged the city to hire a professional parking consultant to study our current parking situation and report on a series of best practices and map out a plan to resolve the issues. Without commissioning this study, there would be no objective voice to guide the governing body in a successful direction to deal with the parking.
We held input sessions between the Parking Consultant and key stakeholders: merchants, the homeowners association, developers, the general public and city departments. All of this input was necessary to generate the consultant’s final report.
The Committee has just concluded a three hour meeting tonight where the draft report was reviewed and discussed, preparing to send our comments and actionable items to the consultant team for inclusion in the final version of the report. Next up — the consultant will present their recommendations to the public and the City Council.
Your recent article, reporting that comments made at a council meeting acted as the spark in the “center of talks” for a plot of land use, was not accurate and simplistic in terms of the planning process that needs to happen in an issue this complicated. The Committee always welcomes the public’s input and hopefully, the more that happens, the less the misinterpretation.
Mike Sodano, Parking Committee member
Asbury Park
[This letter represents the opinion of its writer and is not representative of any opinion of the Asbury Park Sun staff. All readers are welcome to submit Letters to the Editor to news@asburyparksun.com for our consideration. For guidelines on letter-writing and submission, click here.]
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