Town Board Buys New Meters for Commuter Lots

An upgraded multispace parking-meter system should soon be collecting fees—by credit card, debit card or cash, in some cases even remotely—in the town’s three commuter lots in Bedford Hills and Katonah.

The town board voted more than $100,000 Tuesday to install and maintain the new parking technology from Integrated Technical Systems (ITS) Inc. of Wallingford, Conn. The company’s meters are familiar to anyone who has parked in recent years in Croton, White Plains, Scarsdale and a number of other communities in Westchester and elsewhere in the tri-state area.

“This is actually the next generation of hardware over White Plains,” Joe Yorlano, director of sales at ITS, said of the LUKE II meter hed stood beside in town hall Tuesday evening.

Yoriano had rolled LUKE into the board’s meeting room for a demonstration of the new system’s feature options. A pay-by-space technology, it numbers each parking stall in a lot. Motorists enter that number at the machine, then pay for a specific duration of parking time, using cash, credit card, smart card or an online account with a third-party vendor.

Overstayed your expected parking time? Add minutes via cellphone, Yoriano said. Conversely, the meters eliminate “piggybacking,” a practice in which a driver occupies a vacated stall and stays free on some other motorist’s unused but paid-for time. In a multispace system, Yorlano told the board, if you park, you pay.

The meters can also provide a so-called pay-and-display capability, even as it carries out pay-by-space duties, Yoriano said. In a pay-and-display scheme—useful in curbside, unnumbered parking situations, for example—the machine prints a receipt for a specified time that must be displayed on the car’s dashboard.

The upgraded meters, replacing what Town Comptroller Edward Ritter described as outdated eight-year-old technology at the commuter lots, will cost Bedford $107,025 to install. The board included most of that money—$85,905 for new meters—in a bond adopted in June as part of its capital-improvement plan.

Open-space panel adds Diane Lewis

The town board named longtime resident and environmental activist Diane Lewis to the Open Space Acquisition Committee, which reviews properties the town may want to acquire for preservation.

Supervisor Lee V.A. Roberts called Lewis, who chairs the Bedford 2020 Coalition’s water and land use task force, “very smart [and] engaged. A 30-year Bedford resident, Lewis lives in Katonah.

The board also reappointed Amy Parsons of Bedford Hills to her seat on the town’s Historic Building Preservation Commission.