Tuesday night’s discussion of whether to eliminate the Winter Parking Ban in Watertown turned into a larger discussion of parking permits, housing, and how the City communicates messages like snow emergencies.
The City Council held a special meeting to discuss a petition signed by more than 800 residents calling for the removal of the overnight parking ban in the winter months in Watertown. Many of those residents came to meeting, packing the City Council Chamber, spilling out into the hallway and down the stairway. Plus, more than 130 joined remotely on Zoom.
Many said that they must walk long distances (sometimes a mile), sometimes in freezing and icy conditions, to lots where they are allowed to leave their vehicle overnight in the winter. They said the ban is a safety issue for women who have to walk at night, impacts the sleep of people who work off-hours and have to wake up early to move the car out of the lots. Some called it a safety issue for the, elderly, disabled, people with children and others. Also, many said it is an issue of equity, because people can’t afford rent at places with parking, or have to pay a neighbor to park on their property. Several said they cannot have people stay over during the winter because they have no place to park. Many said they were told they had parking when the rented their place, but either it did not have one or it was not guaranteed. Some said they believe it makes Watertown a less desirable place to live.
A smaller number spoke out against removing the overnight parking ban. Many said they do not believe the cars will be moved if there is a major snow storm, even with a snow emergency, so emergency vehicles could not get through. Others said that Belmont residents already park on Watertown streets near the town line because Belmont has a year-round parking ban, and expect them to park during the winter too if the ban is lifted in Watertown. Some worried that there will be more vehicles in general on the street if the ban is lifted, especially when new large residential buildings go up.
Supporters of lifting the ban suggested that a new system could include limiting parking to one side of the street so plows could get through, and if there is a big storm people will get the alert for snow emergencies and move their vehicles. Also, the City could issue parking permits so that people from other communities cannot park on Watertown’s streets. People pointed to Cambridge, Somerville, and Boston as places where they do not have an overnight parking ban, and issue snow emergencies when streets need to be plowed. Somerville and Boston also have parking permits.
Public comments lasted more than two hours.
Staff Input
After hearing from the public, the City Council heard from members of the City staff, including public safety, Public Works, and the Community Development and Planning.
Sgt. David Sampson, who heads the Watertown Police Traffic Division, said that the winter parking ban has been altered over time, but Watertown’s Traffic Rules & Orders says that cars cannot park for more than an hour on the street between the hours of 1 a.m. and 5 a.m.
The signs as people enter Watertown say that the overnight parking ban is enforced from Nov. 1 to April 1, but in reality it is not enforced until after Thanksgiving, and often ends in March. Plus, the last several years there has been a 10 day lifting of the ban during the holidays, Sampson said, to allow friends and family to visit.
While much of the discussion has been about snow, Sampson said that there are other hazard during the winter to worry about.
“Ice is the biggest problem around here: it’s the flash freezes, it’s the black ice,” he said. “A lot of people just think, ‘Snow, snow,’ but it’s not. It’s the freezing temperatures that creates a lot of havoc here, and it makes it very difficult.”
Sampson said that those with a handicap placard on their vehicle are exempt from the parking ban and so they can park near their home. He added that the Police Department will hand out $15 parking tickets, but Sampson said they will also try to accommodate hardships.
“I think we’re probably the most reasonable, most flexible when it comes to this, because we as a Police Department, we give as much consideration as we can: sicknesses in the family,” he said. “Someone had a roof repair that needed to be done; they had a dumpster that’s now the driveway, something they can get done. They give us a call, we give them consideration for a couple of days so they can get that stuff done.”
Ed Baptista, the Department of Public Works Highway Supervisors, has been in charge of snow operations since 1996. He said over the past weekend’s snow emergency plows still had to weave around parked cars.
“There were hundreds of cars on the side of the road. We were fortunate. They were able with our plows, and the trucks were able to reach out separated enough that we could actually make passes through,” Baptista said. “If it’s a big storm, (Sunday) really wasn’t that big a storm, but we have large storms, and we have to go through that sort of situation; if we really have to open up for a large, if it’s going to be ignored like it was in the last storm, I think we’re going to have some problems.”
City Manager George Proakis said that the City’s system of alerting people that there is a snow emergency needs some improvement. Messages went out by phone, text, email, and on the City’s social media accounts. at 4 p.m. on Sunday.
“I wasn’t here for Sunday between 4 p.m. and 1 a.m. I was here early Monday morning, though, and was somewhat surprised to see the number of cars that were on the street with snow over the top of them, and that is with the overnight van and the snow emergency,” he said.
The system used by the City of Watertown, Everbridge, works by calling all phones at homes in Watertown, Proakis said, but he added that many people do not have land lines. People can also sign up to get alerts. Residents can sign up for Everbridge here, and visit the Snow and Winter Storm Information Page on the City’s website.
Somerville not only sends out alerts, but has installed blue lights at corners that flash when there is a snow emergency, Proakis said.
The question of the parking ban is more complicated than just making sure the roads are clear so they can be plowed during a snowstorm, said Assistant City Manager for Community Development and Planning Steve Magoon.
He noted that the Watertown Comprehensive Plan, which was adopted by the City Council in 2023, calls for re-evaluating the overnight parking ban as a medium-term priority in four to six years, which he said would be in 2028.
Other items were short-term priorities. In 2024, the City created new zoning for Watertown Square, including allowing more dense housing with a lower parking requirement — under one space per unit — and the effort to revise Citywide zoning will soon begin.
Another plan that has been adopted, and involves vehicles, is the Resilient Watertown Climate & Energy Plan, which has a goal of reducing single-person vehicle trips by 50 percent by 2050, Magoon said.
“I think we need to be careful about looking at unintended consequences, and if we simply lift the parking ban, I think there is likely to be unintended consequences and things that will happen that maybe were not things wanted to have happen,” Magoon said. “If there is no limitation, other than when there’s a snow event, then I think people will perceive that meaning there’s not a limitation on me parking on the street.”
Other unintended consequences, he said, could be that rents and housing prices will rise because an apartment or home without parking will now be able to accommodate people who have a vehicle because there is no winter parking ban.
Proakis added that a key part of the plan to make more housing in Watertown Square, and make it affordable, is having unbundled parking (where the price of parking is not included in rent, and is available for an added cost). He does not believe that scrapping the winter parking ban would allow this to work.
“That system works. It works really well in the community where I live (Melrose), where we have no allowed overnight on street parking, because we know that if you don’t rent a space in that garage, you can’t have a car because there’s no place else you can put it. It works really well in Somerville right now, because the rule that we establish with unbundled parking buildings is that we don’t give them on-street permits,” he said. “In a community where you unbundle parking and then you give away the curbs for free, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, the system breaks.”
Proakis said that he does not think the most equitable approach is to open up streets for anyone to park for free. He added that he is not an expert, but has been reading what he called “the Bible of parking regulation,” called “The High Cost of Free Parking” by Donald Shoup, a professor at UCLA. (Read the preface here.)
“One of the things I want to focus on, related to this particular issue, is that he’s got a lot of thoughts here on how you link and connect public and private parking, and most of the solutions you come up with when you try to address this substantially rely back on capitalism and market pricing as the solution to problems, and then balancing that with equity is very difficult and challenging, but balancing it with giving away a public common space for free all of the time is particularly complicated,” he said.
The City could sell parking permits, but he said the market rates for those would probably have to be $100 a month, and would need to be accompanied by an aggressive ticketing policy. Proakis worked in Somerville before coming to Watertown, and said that city has a parking permit system, and also has a Parking Department with a budget of $5 million. For Watertown to pay for a similar department, he said fines and fees would have to increase, so parking tickets would not be $15, but more like $50.
Proakis said his job is to provide guidance and assistance to his bosses, the City Council, and implement their policy decisions, however, Tuesday he had a strong recommendation.
“I generally know my strategy as a manager is not to tell the Council policy, but I’m just saying we can work on this long range if we want, but the (current) rules will be on the books for the remainder of this season,” Proakis said.
He added later, that he believes the Comprehensive Plan is a good guide, and that the City needs to continue working on Citywide zoning, to improve public transportation including the Watertown TMA (Traffic Management Association) shuttle, and look at the whole picture. In the meantime he recommends keeping the current system in place.
“And just to be clear, I am not suggesting the answer is necessarily expensive resident permits, or the answer is eliminate alternate side parking, or the answer is a complex snow emergency system, or the answer is towing every car to snow emergency,” Proakis said. “I’m suggesting that we don’t know the answer and that there’s a lot of work to be done to figure it out, because there’s actually some very complex, interactive things here, where, if you push one problem, another pops up somewhere else, and until we actually have a really good handle on that situation, the situation we have is still playing some important roles for us.”
Council Weighs In
City Councilors thanked the people who came out to speak on Tuesday night, and also the people who wrote more than 300 emails on the subject. Many said it is exciting to see so many people interested in local government.
The issue, they agreed, was too complicated to debate and take a vote upon that night.
Council Vice President Vincent Piccirilli read the exact wording of the Comprehensive Plan about evaluating the Winter Parking Ban, which said, “to evaluate on street parking went to parking ban and parking during stone ice events in the context of city wide and neighborhood specific public safety requirements and conflicting demands.”
He added that he looked up the number of registered vehicles in Watertown, and as of December it was 24,154. The ones that do not have parking can park in 13 designated parking locations around Watertown.
“There are 923 spaces in those 13 parking locations. So, we want to sort of define the scope of the project, which I think is important whenever we embark on some sort of study,” he said. “That’s about 3.8 percent of all registered vehicles that are parking in those lots, if every single space is filled overnight, but that means that 96.2 percent of the motor vehicles that are parked tonight are parked on private property.”
Councilor Nicole Gardner said she hopes that the discussion of the parking ban can take place sooner than the Comprehensive Plan calls for.
“Does it have to be 2028? When could we realistically pull that closer in time, if we think that 2025 will be the transit study and the zoning study might be considered 2026 or 2027,” she said. “Or, if we have to push it forward, what gets pushed out? What other priority won’t we be able to get to because we’re working on that instead?”
Councilor Emily Izzo brought up a point also raised by former Councilor Susan Falkoff, about private lots that are unused at night.
“I also want to thank Steve Magoon for working on this, because this was done in the West End with the Cannistraro project, and that is just working with these developments — especially labs that are going to have enormous parking garages — to allow members of the neighborhood and the community to be able to park there, maybe similar to municipal hours,” she said. “So, I just want to encourage continuing to work on that as an option.”
Councilor Tony Palomba said he heard comments that the policy should be called the Palomba Petition, and that he was not following proper Council procedure because he helped draft the petition for the removal of the Winter Parking Ban. He responded that this is the same approach he had on other issues, such as creating the Social Services Resources position for the City, supporting the needs of people with substance use disorder, and on affordable housing issues. He added that after initiating the discussion, a group of residents formed, called Watertown Citizens for Better Parking, and then he stepped back from the petition to let them take the lead.
Palomba said that the petition does not just remove the parking ban, but has suggested alternatives.
“The petition is a call on the Council to amend (the parking rules) in a very specific way. That is to substitute the winter parking ban with snow emergencies,” He said. “This citizen’s petition is not designed to address the issues of streets crowded with cars. If folks feel this is a problem, they should seek out legislative or administrative action to address that. Residents can (currently) park on the street during the day for eight months of the year, night and day.”
He was also skeptical that changing the winter parking ban will impact things like housing prices, and whether Watertown’s Comprehensive Plan and Watertown Square Zoning will work.
“I really find it difficult when someone tells me that moving to a snow emergency situation is going to affect whether the housing prices go up. It’s going to affect whether our Climate Plan is going to be effective and whether the Comprehensive Plan is going to work,” he said. “All of a sudden, one effort to address issues that residents have brought to us has now been used to say that some of our key plans will not be effective. That’s a big leap.”
Councilor Caroline Bays said that she has seen that some of the cheaper housing in Watertown is because the units do not have parking, and now the parking and the affordable housing issues have come into conflict. She said she might have an educational session on these issues during her annual Councilor Public Meeting.
Watertown is not in the same situation as some of its neighbors, said Councilor John Gannon.
“The difference between Cambridge, Boston and Somerville is that Somerville, Cambridge, Boston, have subways. They have buses everywhere you can live without a car,” he said. “And they not only have parking, but they still have an abundance of cars.”
Gannon worked for the City of Somerville when its parking permit program started. He recalled that at first too many permits were issued, so they had to go around Somerville counting how many parking spaces were available and limiting the number of permits.
Council President Mark Sideris said he hopes to move faster on the evaluation than is called for in the Comprehensive Plan.
“I think with the complicated issue here, we have to figure out a better way. Is it one-side parking? I don’t know, is the answer,” Sideris said. “I think we can have some professionals come in and help us with that. I think 2028 is a little too late. I think we can accelerate that.”