The parking lot at the Thorold 50+ Centre on Carleton Street is getting a little too crowded.
As ThoroldToday reported, the city recently moved its development services department over to the second floor of the centre on Carleton Street.
It's only been a month, but City Hall staff has already been taking up too much space in the parking lot, which is hampering operations at the centre.
“The parking was already a problem before you guys moved into the building,” said the president of the Thorold 50+ Association, Brenda Bator, during Friday’s meeting of the city’s Age-Friendly Committee. “Now it’s become really bad.”
The parking lot on Carleton Street easily overflows when the 50+ Centre puts on events, or when there’s a funeral at St. John’s Church next door.
So when the city laid out its plans to move into the second floor of the centre, it committed to building additional parking by September 2025, but there are a lot of uncertainties about the exact timeline of the project.
“Nothing has been finalized,” the Director of Community Services, Dave Baldoni, told committee members. “I’m just waiting for the go-ahead to start the RFP process.”
But he is adamant that the extra parking will be built sooner rather than later.
“No one is actually holding it up,” Baldoni said, later in the meeting. “We’re just waiting for some weather to break.”
The influx of new visitors who are not seniors has also created some traffic safety issues.
“You’re going to have to put some slow down signs out there because yesterday a guy came right into that parking lot whizzing through,” said Bator. “He was told to slow down. We told him it was a seniors parking lot and he said, ‘No, it belongs to the city.’ There was no consideration for seniors walking across the parking lot at all.”
Committee members stressed that Thorold 50+ Centre is continuing to see an uptick in new members, and they want to make sure they keep up with the growth.
“There’s lots of issues, lots to work on,” said Committee Chair Jean D’Amelio-Swyer. “Hopefully they’ll be done sooner rather than later before somebody gets hurt. We don’t want to deter new members from coming because of this parking issue.”
