Today, construction started on municipal lot next to Citizens Bank parking lot. This is part of a major project involving two parking lots on Main Street. The other is Parking Lot 10 in front of the former Post Office. These parking lots are in disrepair and no one can question this. The debate then, is what is the proper fix to the situation. Initial discussions with Western Pennsylvania Conservancy suggested that we could get a grant to build environmentally friendly parking lots that included storm water mitigation features. However, after we developed preliminary plans, the state said we didn’t qualify for a grant. They said our residents aren’t paying high enough sewer bills. Tell that to our residents! Anyway, we were then faced with the prospect of borrowing the money.
Building environmentally friendly features into our parking lots is not cheap. The rebuilding of just two lots will cost $750k. And the interest will be another $250k over the term of the loan. The majority of Council agreed that it was best to proceed. Only Council member Boyd thought we should wait and retry the grant process again next year. The mayor supported and even promoted the project, although he has been critical of Council’s borrowing of money in the past.
To businesses in our downtown who complain that we don’t support them, this million dollar expenditure should demonstrate that we do want to continue the growth in our business district. Comments in last Friday’s PG would seem to indicate that things are moving in the right direction.
So, tomorrow is election day. Half of Council is up for reelection. The challengers for those three seats say that Carnegie needs a change because it’s going in the wrong direction. I hope that you will say that Carnegie is going in the right direction and re-elect Joe Luvara, Sue Demko, and Mike Sarsfield.
carnegiedems.org 