Town hoping for ‘goodwill’ exemption after MBTA enforces weekend parking charges
By Jay TurnerWhile it is customary to leave an offering in the collection plate, several parishioners of St. John the Evangelist Church had no choice but to pay up recently when their cars, which they had parked in the Canton Center MBTA commuter rail lot during Sunday services, were smacked with a $5 ticket despite the fact that trains do not run through the center on weekends.
According to George Comeau, Canton’s MBTA Advisory Board representative, churchgoers and downtown shoppers had been using the vacant lot on Saturdays and Sundays for quite some time and had never before received so much as a warning from the MBTA. However, on January 10 all vehicles in the lot received what the T calls “payment envelopes” issued by Laz Parking, which manages the lot for the MBTA.
Comeau said it was not the amount of the charge but the principle behind it that angered parishioners, whose complaints eventually reached local and state officials, including Canton native and state Rep. Bill Galvin. Comeau then contacted the MBTA directly, as did the St. John’s pastor and a handful of parishioners, and from all sides a request was made to cut the town’s residents a collective break on weekend parking.
“I don’t see what the harm is in allowing people to park there for an hour or an hour and a half to go to church — to go to the bank — on weekends,” said Comeau on Friday, following a series of phone and email exchanges with T officials that resulted in a temporary suspension of further ticketing.
According to the MBTA’s official parking policy, parking fees are “collected and enforced by the parking operator seven days a week, including weekends and holidays.” But while acknowledging that the town did not have a prior written agreement exempting them from this policy, Comeau requested that the T instead take a “common sense approach” and make an exception “in the spirit of goodwill to the people of Canton.”
“The MBTA does not run trains through Canton Center and into Stoughton on weekends,” Comeau wrote in an email to Guillermo Leiva, assistant director for parking services. “Please explain to me what harm could come from allowing Canton residents permission for short-term parking on weekends when the MBTA has no use for these spaces. Canton supports hundreds of MBTA parking spaces at Canton Junction and Canton Center, and it is unfortunate that less than a few dozen local residents who avail themselves of these spaces are charged $5 for what should be a courtesy.”
After being rebuffed initially, Comeau learned late last week from Mark Boyle, director of real estate, that the T had agreed to suspend ticketing for at least one more weekend until a permanent resolution could be reached. MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo confirmed the decision in a telephone interview Friday, adding that the two sides would sit down to discuss the matter sometime this week.
As for the unlucky parishioners, it was still unclear whether their $5 charges would be waived or not, although Comeau said he is hopeful that common sense, in this case, would prevail.
As he explained to Boyle in an email, “I know that these issues can get blown out of proportion, but I assure you the goodwill associated with allowing parishioners and citizens this use on a day when the MBTA has no service through the center will go a long way.”
Short URL: https://www.thecantoncitizen.com/?p=904
Posted by Jay Turner
on Jan 21 2010. Filed under News.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
