At a meeting of the committee Wednesday morning, Nan Stolzenburg, the consultant conducting the study, presented Cooeprstown mayor Wendell Tripp, town of Otsego supervisor Bill Gates and Middlefield supervisor David Bliss with their options on measuring the parking and traffic issues in the study area.

Transportation Concepts is a Schenectady firm specializing in the gathering of such information. Stolzenburg said that a full analysis of the entire area would run between twelve and twenty-four thousand dollars, but that single roads like Route 80 and Route 28 could be surveyed for one thousand dollars each.

"We could wait for peak season," Stolzenburg said, "since that makes the most sense, but we wouldn't do it on Hall of Fame weekend because that amount of traffic is an anomaly and roads aren't constructed to accommodate anomalies."

Stolzenburg said that having the roads surveyed would provide the committee and planning boards with "hard and fast numbers you can hang your hats on," so that if a developer comes forward with a project that would push the roads beyond capacity, a better decision regarding the project could be made.

The committee decided to have State Routes 80 and 28 and County Highway 31 surveyed.

The firm can also conduct a survey of the parking situation for $1,300 to $2,600.

"I don't want to spend that amount and turn around and find out that they're just going to tell us we've got a parking problem in Cooperstown," said Gates.

Bliss said that since parking is such a big problem, they shouldn't miss the opportunity to have it studied professionally.

Tripp said that a parking committee formed roughly nine years ago hired a consultant for $30,000 to tell them where a parking garage might be best located.

"The firm was good," said Tripp, "but the trustees were stupid."

It was the parking committee who decided that a two hour limit in the village would be a good thing, said Tripp, and when he tried to eliminate this inconvenience, the response was overwhelmingly in favor of keeping it.

The committee decided to have Transportation Concepts survey the parking situation.