Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 2, 1994 TAG: 9408020088
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
Pulaski Town Council will get a recommendation today from its Joint Operations Committee to identify available rental spaces for about a dozen business people who have asked for such a list from the town's administrative office.
``Folks are looking for spaces they can rent on a monthly basis,''to leave more parking for business customers on Main Street, said Town Manager Tom Combiths.
But many of those spaces would be available only for six or seven months, until renovations are complete on the Pulaski County brick courthouse. Its offices now occupy temporary rented quarters on Virginia 99 (East Main Street), but when they return to the courts building, the county will have to reclaim parking spaces for court employees.
When courts are in session with juries and witnesses, the peak demand could be 50 to 75 parking spaces.
The long-term solution apparently will be developing a master plan of downtown parking sites and encouraging people to use them instead of taking up potential customer spaces.
Combiths will contact Virginia Tech's Urban Studies Department on the possibility of some of its students surveying potential parking areas as a starting point for that plan.
Meanwhile, Pulaski officials want to hear from people who own potential parking properties downtown and might make them available. Those people can call the town manager's office at 980-1000 during business hours.
The town has tentatively identified 326 off-street public parking spaces downtown. Some are owned by the town and others by Pulaski County or the town's Parking Authority.
The authority was created in 1968 following General Assembly legislation allowing such authorities for the towns of Pulaski and Wytheville. The authorities were empowered to build, maintain and operate off-street parking facilities.
In Pulaski, the authority has accumulated about $25,000 from rental income on the lots it owns, but the organization has not been active in recent years. Pam Jones said she was appointed to the authority about eight years ago and it had met only about three times since then.
Town Councilman Eddie Hale, a more recent appointee, said he had yet to be notified of a meeting.
``We've got to get this thing going again,'' Councilwoman Alma Holston, who chairs the Joint Operations Committee, said Monday at the committee's meeting with members of the authority.
There is a vacancy on the five-member authority, and some question as to whether Hale will continue serving on it since becoming a council member in July. Council makes the appointments, and any new ones would first be considered by its Personnel Committee.
Downtown parking had not been a problem when so many business buildings were vacant. In the past two years, though, the business area has enjoyed a revival.
``With new businesses, we see a greater demand for parking,'' Combiths said. ``That doesn't mean we have to go out tomorrow and buy another parking lot.'' The answer, he said, might lie in ``better utilizing what we have.''
Downtown Pulaski basically has seven areas for public parking: 35 spaces at Main Street and Jefferson Avenue, 65 at First Street Southeast behind the town's Senior Center, 16 at the Fire Department, 12 at the Municipal Building, 15 on Main east of its intersection with Washington Avenue, 135 at the Pulaski County Administration Building, and about 48 at the corner of Third Street and Jefferson Avenue west of the Pulaski County Public Library building.
There are also five handicapped spaces, three at First Street and two at the Municipal Building. The county controls 135 of the 325 regular spaces.
Ideas discussed at the meeting between the committee and authority Monday ranged from construction of walking bridges to providing a shuttle service to downtown from the more distant parking places.
The groups are also interested in ways to encourage parking at the First Street lot, which is not fully used. People are sometimes hesitant, especially in winter when it gets dark earlier, to walk from their businesses or places of employment to that more-distant lot.
by CNB