Parking in Gardner

Question: All right. Let’s talk about parking. You come into town, you recognize there’s more parking needed. So tell us about the locations of parking and what do you see the future of parking in Gardner to be?

Answer: I mean, locations, we do have several city lots. We have the Knowlton Street lot behind City Hall. We have the Nichols Street lot behind the Ale House, between the Ale House and the Gardner Eagles. We have the uptown lot next to the Old LaGrassas by the uptown rotary. There is the West Street parking lot across the street from the Gardner Ale House. There’s the Pleasant Street lot at the Gardner Senior Center. There are a lot of different public parking lots that are free. We also are currently working on the new rear main street parking lot that’ll have a parking lot, event plaza, grass space, and food truck court. That’s set to be done by the end of the calendar year. We do need more parking, especially with the new housing development that we’re seeing in the downtown. We’re seeing in other locations. The city was one of only three communities in Massachusetts, and it was Boston, Salem, and Gardner that received what’s called a RAISE grant. I forget the acronym that RAISE comes from, but it’s a DOT grant that was given out for infrastructure improvements. And what that’s doing is doing a full engineering study of a new four-story parking garage over the West Street parking lot, and again, that’s the lot across the street from the Gardner Ale House, and seeing what that would cost, what it would be designed as, and basically making the blueprints for it so that if we ever do get grant funding to build the garage itself, how would it be built, but also what’s the sustainability plan for maintenance of that garage. That’ll get us another 200 parking spots if we’re ever able to do that as well. So there is a plan in place to try to increase things, it’s just how do we get there, and I think that’s the program that we’re working on right now.