CARIBOU, Maine — Mayor Gary Aiken raised his hand as the final vote to approve the sale of municipal parking lots in the downtown vicinity during Monday night’s council meeting.
Council members David Martin, Philip McDonough along with the mayor voted to sell off downtown parking lots open to the public with the hopes of saving money to the city and removing items from the highway department’s to-do list when it comes time to clearing snow.
Passionate presentations against the sale of the municipal parking lots were given during public comment from local business owners Hugh Kirkpatrick, Patrick Bennett, Cheryl and Kirk St. Peter, Sam Collins and Debbie Sutherland.
“I think it’s a very short-sighted ordinance,” Bennett said after leaving the council meeting. “The issue we tried to get across to the council was that the Urban Renewal Zone, the parking lots and all the buildings that were developed under the Urban Renewal plan are all one piece and that you can’t parcel it out and sell off the public parking lots to private individuals or any other party without the consent of the landowners because you’re going to ‘land-lock’ all of the valuable buildings that are in the downtown area,” Bennett said as he referenced the June 1969 Sweden Street Urban Renewal Area Plan.
In an interview following the council meeting Caribou Chamber of Commerce Director William Tasker said he feels very discouraged about the passing of the ordinance.
“They had a room full of people who raised the same voice, there wasn’t one person in the public hearing that supported what [the council] was trying to do and yet all those people representing hundreds of thousands of tax dollars in this town were really ignored for the sake of saving possibly $20,000 and not having to take care of those parking lots. To me it’s just a shame.”
A fear among those against the sale of the parking lots is that when the lots are bought up the parking spaces will be gated off leaving no place for clients or customers to go.
According to Bennett this is the second time in two years the issue of selling municipal parking has come up, “we thought the issue was resolved between the council and ourselves and the building owners two years ago.”
Bennett, who’s an attorney, feels the next step is to file a lawsuit against the city’s new ordinance.
“We’re thinking awfully hard about it,” Bennett said. “I’m going to try to get as many of the building owners interested in it. I think what we need to do is strongly consider what is called a declaratory judgement action where the plaintiffs to that action ask the court to answer a question and the question we would ask is is the Urban Renewal Plan that created all of this is it still the operative document, which is what we feel.”
