To the Editor:

We have a lot of smart people in this town, but every time Council wants to do a new project, they spend our tax money to hire an outfit from outside to do our thinking for us. This latest scheme they want to shove down our throats really has a lot of us scratching our heads.

Those of us who live near the high school have gotten used to sharing our street parking with the students for years. God forbid these kids walk a half a mile! Soon we will be sharing our streets with the increase in cars from the new housing on Franklin Avenue. Now we are being told that we will have to include the merchants as well? And we can pay for the “privilege” of parking in front of our own homes. Someone will be driving around with a surveillance camera making sure that we toe the line or pay dearly. We bought our houses with the understanding that we had street parking, and this will likely lessen their value.

So far, I am at a loss as to what the benefits would be for us as homeowners. The real hardship for the merchants is that they can no longer park on Wiggins and Witherspoon streets.

The beautiful sycamore tree at the end of my driveway makes backing out a challenge for some of my elderly friends. I’m blind, and I swear I could probably back out of this driveway better than most of my friends, only four of whom have actually admitted to hitting the poor tree. Needless to say, many of them prefer to park on the street.

Once we start down this road of paid residential parking, there will be no turning back. Let’s all put our heads together and come up with a viable alternative such as shuttling people from under-utilized already existing parking lots, paid incentives for carpooling, underground parking — there must be a better solution.

Sue Tillett
Moore Street