Riverhead Town began renovations to the parking lot on First Street this month, after approving a $726,000 bond for repairing and repaving six downtown lots in April.
Plans include the repair and repaving of the First Street lot, with the addition of an extra 67 spaces, according to Councilman Tim Hubbard, the town board’s liaison to the parking district committee. The plans have been in the works since 2013. The plans require the removal of the trees and islands in the parking lot.
“Unfortunately, sometimes to make progress, some of these things have to be done,” Hubbard said. “Trees can be replaced.”
But Judy Barth, the woman who helped plant the trees in the lot more than 20 years ago, opposes their removal. A landscaper and a member of the town’s architectural review board, she was the self-anointed “town gardener” back then. Although she wasn’t employed by the town in any official capacity, she was paid full time by Ivy Acres and was subsidized by the town’s business improvement district from 1995 to 2005 to maintain plants in storefronts and beautify the town’s “sore looking” areas, like alleyways and parking lots, she said.
“Good planning is taking into consideration what is already existing and to be able to utilize what is there, and then make the necessary changes,” Barth said. “To just write something away just to put in a concrete jungle or an asphalt jungle, to me, just doesn’t make sense.”
Barth wants the town board to rethink the plan and amend it to work around the trees. “I’m back there all the time, that parking lot is never even close to being filled to capacity,” Barth said. The exception being large events like the country fair, she said.
Barth said the removal of the trees highlights a broader issue with downtown: the lack of dedicated streetscaping.
Besides the hanging baskets and flower pots, which are provided by the non-profit Riverhead Townscape, the plants in downtown storefronts are left to the store owners, she said. Besides the town’s small building and grounds division, there is no dedicated person or organization that gets paid to maintain or improve downtown’s plantlife.
Barth said that it would be in the town’s interest to have a person focused on maintaining the townscape, however, she understands that there might not be room in the budget to have a dedicated employee.
“You want people to come to this town, you want people to say that this is a beautiful town,” Barth said. “And yet, there’s nothing that entices people, that makes it pedestrian friendly.”
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