On Monday, fencing was moved off of the sidewalk and fully onto the parking lot, but after a 1-hour meeting at Batavia Police Headquarters, nothing has changed as far as the availability of handicap parking for the business owners and their customers at the Bank Street and Washington Avenue
About 15 business owners attended a non-public meeting at the Batavia Police Department on Monday evening, meeting with Ken Pearl/an owner’s representative for the project and City leaders.
New business owner Shelby Rojas, of Batavia Wellness NP, left the meeting early after realizing no solution to the issue would be found this evening.
“It doesn’t sound too promising,” says Rojas.
“Basically, they’re working with a lot of contractors, and they have insurance liabilities that they need to meet and because of that, they have to fence in the entire parking lot because it’s a liability in their contract. We did bring up handicap parking and compliance and they are going to try and accommodate that by adding parking on Washington Avenue and Bank Street, but it’s still not satisfying to the businesses because we have a lot of wheelchair patients that use canes that aren’t able to easily get off the street access. We need more accessible handicap parking.”
Rojas, who just opened her Wellness business in March was very frustrated after Monday’s meeting.
“We need to come up with a solution because at this point there is no solution. Thats why I left the meeting, people were having their own separate conversations, I said what I needed to say. I’m going to be doing veteran’s disability exams and I wanted to make handicap parking a priority, I mean were supposed to have that. I’m just worried that were not going to be able to accommodate that soon enough. Even if the city is trying to make the parking on Washington Avenue and Bank Street, that might take up to three months for them to do that. It’s not like we’re going to have this tomorrow and at the current moment we don’t have handicap parking and its distressing.
Members of local media, standing outside, were not allowed into the private meeting called by Police Chief Shawn Heubusch.
“The biggest reason why we are frustrated is because they literally came to our businesses a couple of days prior, showed us the map that we were going to have the front row of handicap parking, then when we showed up and it was completely fenced off that’s the biggest thing. Either way, we’ve lost a lot of trust in the police station because we felt they deceived us.”
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