Downtown Katonah Gets Uniform Two-Hour Parking

Within weeks, almost all curbside parking spaces in downtown Katonah will be good for two hours, the town board voted Tuesday.

“I’m not sure any of us truly knows what this will mean,” Supervisor Lee V.A. Roberts acknowledged in calling for a vote on the uniform parking time. The Katonah Chamber of Commerce proposed the change in May, saying it would be better for business than the current mix of one- and two-hour parking.

For the most part, spaces along busy Katonah Avenue and the Parkway had been restricted to the shorter time. Soon, however, all but a handful of spaces beside the Katonah Library on Bedford Road, will be signed for two-hour parking.

Merchants had and again at a June public hearing that one-hour spaces forced shoppers to move their cars at least once on a visit downtown. They depicted the typical customer as someone going shop to shop, on multiple errands, before returning to a car. Such a customer, they argued, clearly benefited from the longer permissible parking time.

But the Bedford Road spaces, extending a half block south from the Parkway, will remain one-hour, an eleventh-hour concession to library Director Van Kozelka. She insisted that quick-visit, grab-the-books-and-go patrons make up a substantial piece of the library’s traffic and need the faster turnover one-hour spaces provide.

Still, said Bart Tyler, customers often tote library books and other merchants’ wares when they shop at his store, Kelloggs & Lawrence, on the Parkway adjoining the library. Calling one-hour parking “a hindrance” to that kind of manifold-destination trip downtown, he said, “The spirit of the [parking] proposal is that people in Katonah are .”

Kozelka and Tyler were the lone speakers in a Tuesday public hearing, which had been continued from June. The hearing needed less than half its allotted hour’s time before the board voted, 4-0, to amend the downtown parking rules. Councilman Peter A. Chryssos, a Chamber member, abstained.

Before the revised parking rules can go into effect, Bedford still must formally file the voted changes with the state and install new signs reflecting the hour’s extension in permitted time, a process Town Attorney Joel Sachs estimated could take “a good month” to complete.