Village of East Hills trustees on Wednesday approved new street parking limitations along Kennedy Road in response to residents’ complaints that employees and customers of nearby businesses parking in the area were congesting the roadway.
Under the new restrictions, parking along Kennedy Road will be prohibited from 7:30 to 11 a.m. and from 2:30 to 5 p.m. from Monday through Saturday and from 7:30-11 a.m. on Sundays, to allow school buses to pick up and drop off students, officials said.
Steven Kafka, the village’s traffic and safety commission chairman, said the restrictions would not extend to the middle of the day so that residents who wanted to return home from work to eat lunch or entertain guests would have additional parking available to them.
“Those residents should have the right to park in front of their own houses,” Kafka said.
Kafka said he monitored Kennedy Road’s parking situation by periodically visiting the area at different times of day during an eight-month period and talking with residents, who submitted a petition to the commission and board of trustees requesting restrictions be put in place.
Enforcement of the restrictions is meant to discourage people who work in the commercial buildings at the corner of Kennedy Drive and Glen Cove Road from “using Kennedy Drive as their own personal parking lot,” Kafka said.
“Parking [on Kennedy Drive] is blocked up constantly, encroaching on residents’ driveways,” Kafka said. “There’s not much room in that neighborhood. It’s not a big block and the space between the houses is not large.”
Residents and village civic leaders in attendance were in support of Kafka’s recommendations to the board, saying the parking situation has led to accidents and children having to walk to bus stops further away from their homes.
“There’s no question that your quality of life is affected,” Kafka said. “There’s no question that we want to do something to help it.”
Kafka did not initially request for parking restrictions to be placed on Kennedy Road on Sundays so that residents entertaining guests could offer them an area to park, but residents in attendance said nearby businesses still receive a high traffic volume on both weekend days.
An agreement was reached for Sunday morning restrictions so that employees of those businesses would have to find another place to park when they arrive for work.
Kafka said that the Sunday parking situation along Kennedy Road would continue to be monitored and could later be amended if residents requested it.
“I’d rather not recommend Sunday, but if you come back and your neighbors come back and say we’re not happy with this, let us know and we can always figure out what to do,” Kafka said.
Village of East Hills Mayor Michael Koblenz said residents would have to wait a few weeks for the signs to be printed and erected along Kennedy Drive for the restrictions to take effect, but that police would enforce the new limitations once the signs were put up.
