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Town hoping for 'goodwill' exemption after MBTA enforces weekend
parking charges
By Jay Turner
Citizen Staff
While it is customary to leave an
offering in the collection plate, several parishioners of St.
John the Evangelist Church had no choice but to pay up recently
when their cars, which they had parked in the Canton Center MBTA
commuter rail lot during Sunday services, were smacked with a $5
ticket despite the fact that trains do not run through the
center on weekends.
According to George Comeau,
Canton’s MBTA Advisory Board representative, churchgoers
and downtown shoppers had been using the vacant lot on Saturdays
and Sundays for quite some time and had never before received so
much as a warning from the MBTA. However, on January 10 all
vehicles in the lot received what the T calls “payment
envelopes” issued by Laz Parking, which manages the lot for the
MBTA.
Comeau said it
was not the amount of the charge but the principle behind it
that angered parishioners, whose complaints eventually reached
local and state officials, including Canton native and state
Rep. Bill Galvin. Comeau then contacted the MBTA directly, as
did the St. John’s pastor and a handful of parishioners, and
from all sides a request was made to cut the town’s residents a
collective break on weekend parking.
“I don’t see what the harm is in
allowing people to park there for an hour or an hour and a half
to go to church — to go to the bank — on weekends,” said Comeau
on Friday, following a series of phone and email exchanges with
T officials that resulted in a temporary suspension of further
ticketing.
According to the MBTA’s official
parking policy, parking fees are “collected and enforced by the
parking operator seven days a week, including weekends and
holidays.” But while acknowledging that the town did not have a
prior written agreement exempting them from this policy, Comeau
requested that the T instead take a “common sense approach” and
make an exception “in the spirit of goodwill to the people of
Canton.”
“The MBTA does
not run trains through Canton Center and into Stoughton on
weekends,” Comeau wrote in an email to Guillermo Leiva,
assistant director for parking services. “Please explain to me
what harm could come from allowing Canton residents permission
for short-term parking on weekends when the MBTA has no use for
these spaces. Canton supports hundreds of MBTA parking spaces at
Canton Junction and Canton Center, and it is unfortunate that
less than a few dozen local residents who avail themselves of
these spaces are charged $5 for what should be a courtesy.”
After being
rebuffed initially, Comeau learned late last week from Mark
Boyle, director of real estate, that the T had agreed to suspend
ticketing for at least one more weekend until a permanent
resolution could be reached. MBTA
spokesman Joe Pesaturo confirmed the decision in a telephone
interview Friday, adding that the two sides would sit down to
discuss the matter sometime this week.
As for the unlucky parishioners,
it was still unclear whether their $5 charges would be waived or
not, although Comeau said he is hopeful that common sense, in
this case, would prevail.
As he explained to Boyle in an
email, “I know that these issues can get blown out of
proportion, but I assure you the goodwill associated with
allowing parishioners and citizens this use on a day when the
MBTA has no service through the center will go a long way.”
January 21, 2010
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