Honesdale, business owners and parking tickets

LINDA DROLLINGER
Posted 11/29/17

HONESDALE, PA — Over the course of several decades, Honesdale has grappled with some core challenges that seem to defy a single lasting resolution. Adequate parking space on Main Street is one …

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Honesdale, business owners and parking tickets

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HONESDALE, PA — Over the course of several decades, Honesdale has grappled with some core challenges that seem to defy a single lasting resolution. Adequate parking space on Main Street is one of them. In a five-minute address at the November 20 borough council meeting, Main Street merchant Mike Jones, owner of Northeast Firearms, got to the heart of Main Street’s decline by way of parking tickets.

No stranger to Honesdale commerce, Jones told council members, some of whom are also Main Street retailers, how long his family has been in business there. He recounted the changes that have transpired over the decades to warrant a change of direction in parking enforcement policy. Like the council, Jones has long favored metered parking as a means of preventing a handful of drivers from monopolizing limited Main Street spaces. And like his fellow retailers on the council, he reckons daily with stiff competition from local big-box stores offering customers larger inventory at lower prices, in addition to plentiful free parking.

Jones explained that he and other Main Street retailers have always offered one thing big-box stores cannot: highly personalized customer service. But that, said Jones, takes time. In his case, advice on selection, safe use, storage and care of firearms, combined with the necessity of completing increasingly complex government-mandated background checks and then awaiting their approval,. All of this can easily take more than the two-hour limit on Main Street parking meters. So, Jones pays his customers’ parking fines, just as council president Mike Augello, owner of Music & Video Express, pays his customers’ parking fines. Jones also pays his employees’ parking fees.

Drawing attention to the fact that most Main Street merchants must also park vans, trucks, trailers and other large vehicles used for wholesale pickup, retail delivery, or both, Jones noted that a brief grace period on expired meters would be a godsend for retailers. He also claimed it has not been offered recently. Two newly hired parking enforcement officers pursue expired meters with a zeal not previously seen in the borough. Jones said he watched one officer wend down the 900 block of Main Street, arguably one of the street’s busier blocks. Instead of going from one meter to the next, the officer raced only to flashing meters, some within seconds of expiration.

Jones sees that not as enforcement, but as the borough profiteering at the expense of merchants and their clientele. Holding up two tickets, he said, “Eight tickets were issued; two had my name on them.”

honesdale, parking

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