CARIBOU, Maine — After hearing from two concerned Caribou residents, City Council and Police Chief Michael Gahagan agreed to temporarily suspend any parking tickets that would normally be issued for parking in the Hatch Drive lot behind the movie theater, until Council meets again on Jan. 25, 2016 to hold a public hearing and further discuss the issue.
“We can suspend it for now until we meet and decide what we are going to do until the ordinance,” said Councilor Joan Theriault.
The council initially wanted to suspend ticketing for all lots in the area. Chief Gahagan agreed to temporarily suspend ticketing in just the Hatch Drive lot, emphasizing that the suspension will not take place in any other lots. City Council ultimately voted to accept this compromise, as many of the problems brought up by residents center around that particular lot.
C.B. Smith, owner of Virtual Managed Solutions on Sweden Street, told Council that the ticketing is not the right message to send when Sweden Street businesses like VMS and Sitel are bringing jobs and money into the city.
“I’ve been working in Caribou for 12 years,” said Smith. “I was at ATX when we had 350 to 400 people working there during two different shifts, as well as overnight staff. I’ve never seen anybody get a ticket for parking, but I have seen times when the Police Department would show up and ask employees to move their vehicle away from the front store. At that time, there really wasn’t much else going on on Sweden. We’re fortunate to have more going on right now, but it seems to be quite unnecessary to force people to move their vehicle every two hours and walk a quarter of a mile.”
Smith’s staff works 24 hours a day, and have received numerous tickets. Two ATX staff members, according to Smith, were ticketed without warning.
Council members told Smith that the parking ordinance was passed back in March of 2015.
“There is a big, prosperous movement that’s happening, and we should be enjoying that instead of putting a damper on it,” Smith added.
Anissa Levesque, who owns County Qwik Print with her husband David, also approached City Council with parking complaints, passing out a map which highlighted the Hatch Drive parking lot.
“This affects, I believe, seven different businesses,” said Levesque. “It is a quarter of a mile in order to walk from my building to the current city-owned overnight parking lot.”
At the time, employees of Sweden Street businesses had to park at the Sweden Street Shopping Plaza Center lot. Levesque told Council that this lot is unsafe in cases where one may need to park overnight.
“There are safety issues, too,” continued Levesque. “There are employees that work nights and leave at two or three in the morning. Our town is not drug-free. That parking lot is not lit and there are no surveillance cameras. My car has never been broken into in the parking lot below mine, but you might as well say goodbye if you put it in the other parking lot.”
