Dear Mayor Celender,
I have written to you at least six times over the past month about the dire parking problem in the residential Welwyn Road/Shoreward Drive area.
Unfortunately, I have not received a single response from you — not now; not in the past.
A large number of residents who live in the apartments on Welwyn Road do not have garages available to them, so we have to street park our cars.
More often than not, it is impossible to find parking in the vicinity of our apartments within any reasonable time frame; sometimes we cannot find parking at all.
There are several posted street signs noting three-hour parking in this area.
Residents with parking permits from the Village of Great Neck Plaza are exempt.
Many non-residents — mostly Shop Delight employees — usurp the spaces on the streets all day long and late into the evening.
They come out periodically to check their tires for chalk marks. If they do find chalk marks (which is a very rare occurrence), they erase them.
Or sometimes they come out in pairs and quickly switch places with one another, each moving his car to the opposite side of the street from where it was previously parked — still illegal under the 3-hour parking limitation.
If the village made a commitment to police the three-hour parking limit by ticketing the illegally parked cars, the parking fines might stop the illegal parking.
I know that Shop Delight has made a good attempt to take their employees’ cars off the street by buying them stickers for the village parking lots — which you have sanctioned.
However, the employees still persist in parking in the residential spaces, regardless of the fact that they have stickers for the village lots.
Proper code enforcement on Welwyn Road would solve the problem.
In my letters, which you have ignored, I have offered a multitude of suggestions to deal with the problem. Here are just a few of them:
• Keep a code enforcement officer in this area who will ticket offenders on a regular basis. This would pay for itself over and over from the ticket revenue.
• Post a code enforcement officer on Welwyn Road and/or Shoreward Drive every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 9:45 a.m., just before alternate side of the street cleaning is finished at 10 a.m..
Have code enforcement watch and record the non-resident cars as they overtake the street. Once these cars are identified, code enforcement could easily return for a short time three hours later to issue tickets.
• Take the Shop Delight employees off the street by having them park in the lot in back of the store.
Shoppers will not be inconvenienced because there is valet parking available.
Lack of parking in this area has been a problem for many years.
We often become prisoners in our own homes because we know we will not be able to park when we get home. We have needed your help for a long time, but none has been forthcoming.
Our one hope is that the post office garage for residents will materialize, but without Sen. Schumer’s involvement that proposal probably would not have come about at all.
Even if the resident garage does come to fruition at some future date, what are we supposed to do until then?
We are at our wits end; we cannot hang our cars from trees.
I find it extremely disconcerting that officials who have been elected to serve their constituents still refuse to properly address this issue.
Mayor Celender, your apathy is blinding.
It’s time for you do your civic duty to deal with this problem in a reasonable fashion. We are waiting.
Muriel Pfeifer
Village of Neck Plaza
(We want our “Great” back!)
Readers Write: Plaza ignores resident parking woes
