Public Gains 75 Spaces At State Lot

State Street visitors will have 75 more public parking spaces available to them on weekends and on weekdays after dark thanks to a mutually voluntary termination of an exclusive parking arrangement between the city’s parking authority and Goodfellas Restaurant.

During Monday night’s regular monthly meeting of the New Haven Parking Authority at its headquarters at 232 George St., parking commissioners voted to end a nearly three-year-agreement between Goodfellas and the city authority that granted the Italian restaurant exclusive parking rights for employees, invitees and patrons at a Parking Authority-managed parking lot across the street from the restaurant at the corner of State Street and Trumbull Street.

Parking Authority Director Doug Hausladen and city Economic Development Director Matthew Nemerson explained that the restaurant had exclusive access to the lot in the first place because Goodfellas reached out to the state Department of Transportation (DOT) in 2014, saying that it needed more parking for customers. It sought permission to develop a parking lot on a vacant grassy patch in the shadow of I‑91.

The restaurant received from the state the right of first refusal to develop the area into a 75-space parking lot, rent it from the state, and then hand the lot over to the city parking authority for operations.

Goodfellas entered into an agreement with the city’s parking authority on May 7, 2015, agreeing to pay it $1,350 per month in exchange for exclusive access to half of the lot’s 77 parking spots between 5 p.m. and 3 a.m. each weekday evening and all day on weekends. The restaurant also received exclusive access to 10 spots in the lot during weekday days.

Several months later, Hausladen said, Goodfellas reached back out to the authority saying it needed the full lot on weekday evenings. It agreed to pay the authority $2,531 each month in exchange for the spaces.

The restaurant allowed the city parking authority to open up the lot during weekday days to monthly public parking subscribers.

All the while, Goodfellas retained the first right of refusal on the lease hold of the lot, thanks to the agreement with the state.

But earlier this month, Goodfellas offered to allow for the authority to convert the lot into a fully publicly-accessible parking lot.

“We decided that we didn’t need all the spots,” said Goodfellas head chef Gerry Iannaccone, ​“and it wasn’t worth the money.”

He said that Goodfellas continues to reserve spaces for its customers in a parking lot on at the corner of Bradley Street and State Street just on the other side of the overpass.

Parking Authority commissioners also voted on Monday night to establish a transient rate structure at the State-Trumbull parking lot, meaning that the lot will not only be available to drivers who purchase $90 monthly parking passes, but also to visitors willing to pay $1 per half hour to park at the lot, which is the same rate the authority uses at the Granite Square garage across the street.

“By 9:30, the monthlies are in,” Hausladen said. ​“Anything after that is gravy. We can accept money all day long.” He and Parking Authority Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Brian Seholm said that the lot currently has 38 monthly parking subscribers, and that 12 more will be joining in May.

“We had proposed this solution from the very beginning,” city Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson said during the meeting. ​“But they thought they needed to have the spaces. So to end up where we wanted to end up was something that is good for everybody here.”

He and Hausladen noted that the city frequently receives complaints from State Street restauranteurs about a dearth of commercial parking spaces in the area. Hausladen said he hopes to get other nearby restaurants involved in the parking authority’s restaurant parking program, where restaurants can pre-pay $2 hourly spots for customers.

“The emotions run high in a very crowded and growing restaurant area,” Nemerson said, ​“and to make sure that all the customers can be handled in a fair and equitable way is something that people challenged when the spaces were dedicated to Goodfellas. That was because, if we hadn’t don that, we couldn’t have had the ability to have a public lot here. It’s a win-win.”

Hausladen said that the conversion of this partially-private lot into a fully-public one coincides well with burgeoning commercial development at that area, with the recent opening of Dashi at State and Bradley and the imminent opening of a brew-pub at the old Jet Cleaners at 687 State St. He said that the State-Trumbull lot works well with the city’s efforts to restripe certain State Street parking spaces and rehab the Chestnut and State-Pulaski parking lots in order to meet the public parking demands he hears from neighboring restaurants.

He also noted that the State-Trumbull lot was cited as the state’s first ​“green” parking lot because of its use of rain gardens to consolidate drainage and prevent excess rain water from filtering into the streets.