Downtown tenants ask for reserved spaces after pavilion removes roughly two dozen spots

Daneen and David Kreuzer, owners of property at 136 Main Street, told the Public Safety Committee that construction of a new pavilion and related changes reduced parking behind their building and created safety and maintenance problems for tenants and businesses. "Behind First China Restaurant, where the new pavilion was, a total of 26 parking spaces were lost due to the pavilion location," Daneen Kreuzer said, and described rolling plastic dumpsters, cut-through traffic patterns, and tenant vehicles being subject to towing during evening theatre events.

The Committee discussed possible responses but emphasized constraints. Safety Director Dan Chafin outlined administration and enforcement challenges: the City does not operate a parking-violations bureau, court rulings limit tactics such as chalking tires to enforce short-term parking, and reserving publicly owned spaces for private tenant use raises policy and administrative questions. "Should public spaces be reserved for private use? That was probably the overarching question over this entire discussion," Chafin said. Committee members asked Administration to inventory downtown easements, municipal lots and the number of apartments downtown (estimated at 55–60) and to coordinate with Public Ways, Planning and Code Enforcement. Ideas discussed included leasing municipal lots to private managers, targeted reserved passes, localized towing signage enforced by private owners, and incorporating parking into the planned downtown infrastructure project; no formal change was made at the meeting.