Council Passes Parking Ordinance, 9-3

Despite passionate, well-researched objections to ParkMobile, Council ignores the will of the people. Again.

At the Borough Council meeting on August 27, to no one’s surprise, Council approved the new parking ordinance which will install ParkMobile on residential streets.

We would like to acknowledge the three council members who voted against this unneeded ordinance: Aliza Narva, Steve Spindler, and Deborra Sines-Pancoe.

Council member Khalil seemed to have doubts about the ordinance but voted in favor anyway, after being told that there would be a six-month review. Our opinion is that six months will pass and this “review” will be conveniently forgotten.

Council members Soltysiak and Ballard stated that the time and effort put into preparation of this ordinance was sufficient reason to vote for approval. Time and effort doesn’t make something right, or valuable, or needed; time and effort is often spent on something totally useless, which is what happened here.

Council member Bruno put forth the trope “perfect is the enemy of the good” to justify her vote to pass the ordinance. This ordinance is neither perfect nor good.

Borough residents have made it perfectly clear to Council on multiple occasions that they oppose this ordinance and that ParkMobile is neither necessary nor wanted on residential streets.  Yet Council, whose task it is to represent constituents, ignored the residents.  What kind of representative government is this?  The answer is that it isn’t representative government.  It is government by a few who pay lip service to the idea of listening to their constituents, but who then do whatever it is they want to do regardless of how it conflicts with the residents’ needs and desires.

Of interest is that none of the Council members who voted to approve the ordinance will be directly affected by it. Certainly, the Council members for Ward 2 will not; they all live at Beaver Hill. All three of them approved the ordinance. To our knowledge, none of the remaining Council members who voted to approve this ordinance live on streets that are affected by it.

Additionally, as one resident pointed out at Wednesday’s meeting, it makes no sense to pass an ordinance before the promised parking study is completed. The Borough engineer has supposedly been working on a parking inventory since June as is evidenced by his report submitted at each monthly Council meeting.  Where are the results of this inventory?  It is our understanding that the inventory is a precursor to the parking study which was promised to the residents.  If the inventory and then the promised study show that there is no need for the ordinance changes which were just approved, is Council then going to once again re-write the ordinance to remove the changes? This is, as the resident stated, totally backwards.

The bottom line is that ParkMobile is not necessary and should not be used on residential streets, and in approving this ordinance, Borough Council has failed in their duty and responsibility to the constituents they represent.

More Apartments for Jenkintown

Council also voted unanimously to approve the new apartment building at Cherry Street and York Road, where the Helweg funeral home once operated. The architects considered and implemented many changes suggested by Jenkintown’s review board, which explains why this ediface looks like it was designed by committee or was originally intended for another location.

Council Desperately Needs An AV Nerd

In 2017, Walkable Jenkintown brought an iPhone and a tripod to the council meetings. Not only did it livestream the proceedings for the first time in Jenkintown history, it posted the meeting with annotations the next day.

About a year later, fearful of losing control of its narrative, Council finally got its act together with its own live streaming system. Unfortunately, the sound was worse than the picture, and it took them weeks if not months to post the meeting on their YouTube channel.

At this last meeting, Council President Jay Conners proudly pointed to the installation of a new wide-angle camera mounted at the back of the room. Previous to that, the new system provided members sitting at the dais with microphones, while commenters and presenters pass around a hand-held wireless microphone.

The system remains a mess. Unfortunately, it did not maintain its connection to the Borough’s Facebook, it generated ear-splitting feedback, and for the first 45 minutes of the meeting, Chief Scott spent more time at the back of the room fiddling with the laptop than he did at his seat. As a result, the meeting was not on Facebook, although those who signed up for Zoom access might have had better luck.

Did Council do a test run first? When will it provide a lectern for speakers instead of passing around a microphone like the Oprah show? It’s been almost ten years.