By JIM AUSTIN
Editor

Less than a year after it rejected the mayor's idea eliminating two-hour parking in the business district, the board of trustees appeared poised to do just that Monday night.

Trustee Stu Taugher, chairman of the police committee, presented a proposal to suspend the time limit on parking in the business district while Eastern Standard Time is in effect and reinstate the limit when clocks are adjusted to Daylight Savings Time.

"It seems ridiculous that you can come down here in January and there's two cars on the street and one guy's got a parking ticket," he said.

During the winter months parking is not the problem it is in the summer when any space left unfilled is quickly claimed by the first motorist who encounters it.

"If you took away two-hour parking [during the summer], you'd have nothing but utter chaos. You'd have the street lined with cars from morning to night. You'd have nothing, but gridlock," Taugher said during the board's discussion of parking last December.

Trustee Carol Waller said she was concerned about how the downtown merchants would react to the to the latest proposal for the elimination of two-hour parking and wanted a chance to talk to some of them.

Glenn Hubbell, who was not on the board last year, has his office on Main Street and said he believed it would be a mixed response from businesspeople.

In recent years the board has suspended two-hour parking downtown for the holiday season and Mayor Wendell Tripp said last year he has never had any complaints about.

His concern Monday night was that the board could not change the local law governing parking by a simple resolution of the board, but that it would require a public hearing and an amendment to the law.

Parking has been a long-standing problem and has plagued village officials for years. According to current mayor Wendell Tripp, former mayor Harold Hollis said it all boils down to too many cars and too few spaces.

"As our dear friend the late Harold Hollis said, 'You have a physics problem. You can't put 1,000 cars in 400 spaces,"' Tripp said last year.

The now disbanded parking committee tried for eight years to find a solution to the parking problems in the village. The committee looked at a number of alternatives, including building a parking garage and switching to paid parking in the Doubleday Field lot. Ultimately the committee decided to disband because there is no solution and they had gone as far as they could, Tripp said.

In fact, he added, it was the proposal of a parking garage which prompted his entrance into local politics after he wrote a letter in opposition to the idea.

The board took a straw vote Monday night to determine if there was support for the proposal with Malone, Sanford, Taugher and Ed Tripp in favor and Waller and Hubbell against.

The board will investigate the process required to eliminate the two-hour parking provision in the law and may set a public hearing if required.