Wall Street at Front Street in Uptown Kingston. Photo: Andre Carrotflower, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Kingston’s Common Council has put the city’s municipal parking lots off-limits for sale until at least the end of 2027, overriding Mayor Steve Noble’s veto by the narrowest margin the city charter allows.
The vote was 6-3, exactly the number needed to override, the Daily Freeman reported. Alderpersons Sara Pasti (Ward 1), Ben Falk (Ward 4) and Bob Dennison (Ward 6) voted to sustain the veto. The moratorium lasts through Dec. 31, 2027, or until the city finishes the parking study it has underway, whichever comes first. A preliminary presentation projected the study would wrap up next summer.
That study is the same one behind the citywide parking survey we wrote about earlier this month, which is taking resident comments through Dec. 18.
The lot at the center of it
The fight is mostly about one property: a city lot of roughly 60 spaces at 65-77 N. Front St. in Uptown, next to the Kingston Nord restaurant. In June, Noble’s office picked Gemion Consulting and Rockabill Development to turn it into a mixed-use building with about 50 affordable apartments and ground-floor storefronts.
According to Noble, the plan calls for eight units at 30% of area median income, 18 at 50%, 22 at 60% and two at 80%. In his veto letter he wrote that “choosing parked cars instead of affordable housing is just bad public policy,” and noted that the council has itself declared a housing emergency.
Noble also warned that the moratorium could put the Parkline project at 25 Field Court at risk. That development is planned to include about 70 deeply affordable units and, he said, a municipally owned parking lot for residents and visitors.
The council’s side
Michael Tierney, who represents Ward 2 and the Uptown business district, has been the loudest critic of the North Front Street plan. He argues that the city lot brings in revenue at a time of budget pressure, that the administration should have involved the public and the council before moving to sell a city asset, and that free lots elsewhere, such as the Cornell Street lot in Midtown, would have been better first candidates for housing. He also said the moratorium wouldn’t affect Parkline, because there is no municipal lot on that site.
Noble disputes that he left the council out. He said the request for expressions of interest gave the Ward 2 alderperson a direct role, which Tierney declined, and that Council President Andrea Shaut appointed Falk to sit on the review team instead. A member of the Kingston Uptown Business Association also took part.
Tierney’s public reaction to the veto was blunt enough that the Freeman printed it with a dash. The exchange fits a pattern. The all-Democratic council and the Democratic mayor have been at odds for most of the year, starting with the council’s 9-0 override in January of Noble’s veto of rent stabilization, a vote that landlords are now challenging in court.
The garage question
Noble’s argument leans on the Kingstonian, the long-delayed mixed-use project a few blocks away in Uptown. It includes a 430-space parking garage, along with 143 apartments, a hotel, a plaza over part of Fair Street Extension and a pedestrian bridge to Kingston Plaza. Demolition of the old Uptown Grill Diner on the site started this summer. The mayor says the garage will “completely remove” Uptown parking concerns.
Tierney’s answer is that the garage will be privately owned, so the developer can charge what it wants. City lots run on rates the council sets.
For now, the Front Street lot stays a lot. The developers’ timeline was already two to three years, according to the mayor, so the real effect depends on how fast the parking study lands and what it says. Residents who want a say on parking can still take the city survey before Dec. 18.
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