BY ADAM ATKINSON

North Country This Week

POTSDAM — The village is planning to take a closer look at its downtown parking situation and how it may be improved in the context of the upcoming streetscape project funded by the state’s Downtown Revitalization Initiative.

At their meeting Nov. 6, the village board approved a proposal for a parking study from Clarkson University civil engineering professor Eric Backus who leads the Clarkson Construction Engineering Management Consulting Group (C3G) which is comprised of the school’s civil engineering students.

Village Trustee Alexandra Jacobs Wilke and Police Chief Mike Ames had requested that Backus and his student civil engineering group present a proposal for a formal parking assessment study.

At the village meeting Nov. 6, Backus presented an overview of modern parking development with green space at Fairfax, Virginia that was built from a similar study.

Backus said the C3G group could conduct the study during the week of Nov. 13th.

“You might be asking why we are doing this. Our last comprehensive plan, now more than ten years ago, called for a parking management study that never materialized,” Jacobs-Wilke told the board.

Jacobs-Wilke said that a recent enforcement action targeting village parking in the downtown area identified that there were spots being taken up by people for much longer than was authorized without the turnover that was needed in certain areas.

Jacobs-Wilke said that parking in the village’s downtown business district was a public resource paid by village taxpayers and was not free.

“But we haven’t really analyzed our policies around it in many years,” she said.

Wilke said the conversation regarding the village’s downtown streetscape project and whether to install modern digital parking kiosks instead of the village’s old parking meters sparked the need to analyze downtown parking. The village board tossed around the idea of kiosks instead of meters at a meeting several weeks ago.

“I’m hoping the study will help us get a sense of some decisions that are going to be coming before us in the not-to-distant future,” she said.

The study will cost the village $5,717 to be paid from the village’s ARPA funding account.