Pelham Board Gives Parking Extension to Carol Avenue Residents

Pelham village officials are extending the grace period for on-street parking on Carroll Avenue to Sept. 1.

The village board made this announcement during Tuesday’s town board meeting in response to that they are being unfairly ticketed after being allowed to park freely for 50 years.

The initial deadline was June 1. It is hoped that the new timeline will give residents more time to make other parking arrangements and give board members more time to come up with a long-term solution.

“This is a very complicated matter, so to the extent that I am completely sympathetic to your position that about the purchase of your homes and the narrowness of your driveways—the difficulty that this creates,” Trustee Paul McGoldrick said during the meeting.  “We still are left with this conundrum  of what do we do when you have a law which is unambiguous on the one hand, that says there can be no overnight parking and then your circumstances.”

The issue originates from an agreement that the village reached with the Clovelly Homeowners Association, along with residents of Brookside and Hillside avenues, in December to have access to 24 hour street parking permits. Village officials agreed to give Clovelly Inc., the right sell parking permits to the residents in its townhouses in exchange for annual parking fees.

As part of the village’s parking agreement with Clovelly Inc., Clovelly agreed not to fight the village’s claim that Brookside and Hillside avenues are public streets. This agreement is important because it allows the Picture House to install a storm-water remediation pipe on Brookside Avenue as part of its expansion project.

The parking permits extend to the west side of Carol Avenue and only cost $250. However, village law prohibits other Carol Avenue residents from parking on the public street overnight. Instead, they must pay $750 for annual permits that allow them to park in designated spots away from their homes.

“This is not a precedent for anything else,” Mayor Edward Hotchkiss said of the agreement. “This is solely the settlement of a dispute, so it has nothing to do with anything else on Carol.”

Robert Keller, a member of the Carol Avenue Association, said neighborhood residents have been allowed to park on Carol Avenue the past 50 years without any problem. He said all of the residents in the neighborhood should have been included in the settlement.

“There’s people on the street who have been parking there forever, people who bough their houses and were told you can park on the street overnight,” Keller said. “And now, all of a sudden, after years you’re coming in and turning over the apple cart and then, we have to watch people on the opposite side of the street park there for $250 a year...I think it would have not only been fair to the community and the entire neighborhood, but politically astute to avoid all of this.”

The other option for residents in the neighborhood is to park along Boulevard, on the Mount Vernon Border, near the train station or Mount Vernon. But residents dislike the parking on Boulevard because they have had constant problems with their cars being broken into.

Hotchkiss said he is aware that police did not enforce the parking law on Carol Avenue, but it he did not know why. The practice was in place long before any of the board’s current trustees were elected.

“In terms of fairness, we have to look at not only in terms of what’s on Carol , but we have to figure that there is 150 people now who are doing resident permits—they’re paying $750,” Hotchkiss said. “It’s not because just because they used to be close to some street that used to be private and there was this dispute over. So they have to pay that and there’s a fairness in there for the village.”

Hotchkiss said the board needed to discuss the issue further before the issue is resolved.