Town Implementing "Major" Parking Changes On Tuesday

The sight of the Surfside Beach parking lot jam-packed with work trucks and other vehicles over the winter was slightly jarring - as it's typically empty during those months - but that parking scenario is coming to an end.

The town has announced that it is reopening the 2 Fairgrounds Road municipal parking lot on Tuesday, and ending the Surfside Beach parking lot shuttle service.

The Fairgrounds Road lot has been closed since last November to allow for several municipal projects to be completed, shifting dozens of vehicles to the Surfside Beach lot over the winter. 

While the town had discussed implementing paid parking at the Fairgrounds Road lot, it will reopen once again as a free parking area, albeit with more oversight and new regulations, including:

• No parking for longer than 96 consecutive hours (four days).
• No vehicles over 12,000 lbs gross weight.
• No vehicles longer than 30 feet.
• No trailers or semi-trailers, including landscaping and RV trailers.

Those restrictions will be enforced through ticketing and towing.

Paid parking at the lot is still coming, police chief Jody Kasper said, just not right away.

"We are not going to be doing enforcement for pay at this time, although we have all agreed it will transition to a pay lot," Kasper said. "But there's procurement issues and we're working with finding a vendor for that." 

At the Surfside Beach parking lot, the overnight parking restriction between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. will resume on Tuesday. 

Select Board member Matt Fee did not object to the parking lot reopening and the changes but did comment that the town should contemplate whether that is the best use of such a valuable piece of property.

"It's great that we're doing this, but I look at this long-term and I think this property is too valuable to turn into parking lots," Fee said during last week's board meeting. "I would hope we keep this short-term, a 10 or 20-year deal, and work our transportation in a manner that brings the buses to people and doesn't require people to drive and park here. Long term, I think this property is way too valuable to use in this manner."

Erika Mooney, the town's operations manager, reminded Fee that the lot was created to provide parking for commercial vehicles coming from off-island.

"When we originally started this lot it was for commercial vehicles because they don't have a place to park and most are coming from off-island," Mooney said.

"If I want to park my commercial vehicle in Hyannis, the Hyannis government doesn't do it for me," Fee replied. "We as a town have housing needs, a town building we need to move, etc. I look at it slightly differently."

The key changes the town announced late last week are as follows:

• 2 Fairgrounds Road (2FG) Lot reopens April 15 with a newly re-aligned layout, improved traffic flow, and a MEPA-required reclaimed section (0.30 acres) that is now off-limits for parking or public access. This reclaimed area will become part of the future Waitt Drive neighborhood development.
• The Surfside Beach Parking Lot will no longer serve as an NRTA Ferry Connector shuttle location. The final shuttle departs at 8:00 p.m. on April 14. The lot will close at 5:00 p.m. on April 15, with ticketing beginning at 2:00 AM on April 16 for any vehicles that remain.
• Overnight parking restrictions (2:00–4:00 a.m.) at the Surfside lot will resume on April 16.
• New regulations at 2FG include restrictions on vehicle size, trailers, and long-term parking. Enforcement will include ticketing and towing.

The parking lot at 2 Fairgrounds Road was closed last November due to the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection's PFAS investigation, which involved drilling several test wells around and inside the lot to assess PFAS contamination. The other project was the Waitt Drive Municipal Workforce Housing Project, which utilized the lot as a staging area for modular housing units.

When the lot was cleared of vehicles last November, Kasper said the town discovered 17 trailers and approximately 30 to 35 cars that had been parked there "for many months or longer than that. We want to avoid that and keep it an active lot."

The Nantucket Police Department will be assigning a community resource officer to the lot this spring and summer to enforce the new restrictions on the area, Kasper said.

"There's been a lot of conversation about how this lot should be used and I know there's a lot of different thoughts on it," Kasper told the Select Board last week. "We're struggling as to what the best use is and what people want to use it for - commercial vehicles, residential parking, day parking. It's complicated, and we're trying our best to balance all of that."