Joe Town, owner of Pace’s Pizzeria on Third Street, spoke during this week’s City Council work session. He noted that many other restaurants downtown are located in areas that don’t have parking meters. He would like the same sort of accommodation. Parking on the back side of the Northwest Arena, he said, isn’t in high demand much of the time his business is open until after meter monitoring ends.

“The first item is as I drive around Jamestown I notice that all my friends who own restaurants, and I’m happy this is the case, I don’t want that to change, they don’t have meters in front of their restaurants – Forte, Lisciandro’s, The Pub, Sauce, etc. don’t have meters in front of their restaurant,” Town said. “Really the only quarters the gentleman who collects from the meters gets are from me every morning when I’m making my ingredients and Holly, who is my manager. Time gets away from us sometimes and the tickets do pile up.”

Town asked that a loading zone designation be considered for workers in his restaurant who are trying to unload supplies in the morning so they don’t have to worry about parking meters or carrying bags and boxes across Third Street from a parking lot across the street to the restaurant.

“Again, it’s not a highly desirable parking situation,” Town said. “There’s no competition. I don’t see why we’d need a meter there or take the meter down, take the top of the meter off the pole like you see on Main Street.”

Traffic passes in front of Pace’s Pizzeria on Third Street on Wednesday. P-J photo by John Whittaker

More importantly for Town’s business, he said, is the pace and speed of traffic at Third and Fourth streets. Many customers will try to park in the surface lot across the street because it’s free to park there – but Town said the speed of traffic from the Third Street bridge and the speed of traffic coming down Fourth Street to Third Street is creating an unsafe situation for pedestrians trying to get in and out of his restaurant.

Town asked the city to consider a traffic study of the area while also offering to take video from his business that would document some of the issues he’s seen – including a near fatality last year when a pedestrian was hit crossing the street.

“This isn’t me being dramatic, this is the case,” Town said. ” I sit at the table and I look out the window and there are near misses, you could call it a near hit, almost every single day. … Just Sunday, I was out there and I had to go out there in the middle of the road and stop traffic because there was an older lady carrying a pizza trying to cross the road. I don’t want to be the reason someone dies because they’re coming to get pizza, or someone gets into an accident the way the street is designed.”

Joe Town, owner of Pace’s Pizzeria on Third Street, is pictured speaking to City Council members during Monday’s meeting. Town is asking council members to consider changes to the parking meters outside his business as well as the safety of the intersection of Third and Fourth streets.