Letter to the editor

Dear Editor,

My husband and I own Mountain Home Printing and we’ve been in business for 32 years. We’ve moved to our current location because of the ease of accessibility and parking for our customers. Most of our customers only need to be in our office for a few minutes, so it works out great. We have many senior citizens who regularly visit our store. Some customers just need to get a few copies and others, pick up cases of printing.

I went to the Economic Development open house on Feb. 27 to see what they are proposing. The plan takes away all store front parking on the left side of North 2nd East and puts in wider sidewalks for the use of tables and chairs. I spoke to Courtney Lewis’ assistant, Taylor Neveu, who is not from Mountain Home and is not familiar with our town. I told her the idea of taking away parking on our street would cause a major problem. She said, “the small-town mentality about parking is that if you can’t park in front of the business there isn’t enough parking.” She couldn’t be more wrong. Being able to park close is an asset in a small town. After all, we ARE a small town.

When I told Ms. Neveu that we have customers that are not capable of walking long distances, she suggested allowing them access to the back door. That is not a viable option for a business like ours. We have several pieces of large equipment in our building and that would be a huge liability issue. If potential customers can’t get to us easily, or find us, they bypass us altogether.

Customers needing to frequent the businesses on the left side of the street are going to have no choice but to park on the right side and jay-walk across or risk being towed by parking in private parking lots. If the sidewalks are widened the current sidewalks will all have to be torn out. How long are businesses expected to have to be closed?

I have serious concerns and they are not being taken seriously. Currently downtown has parking on both sides, three lanes of traffic and two-way streets on ALL side streets and it is the perfect setup. Why change something that works? We don’t HAVE to do anything. ITD owns the highway and they will re-pave the highway at no cost to the city. Will ITD keep up the maintenance of this road if changes are made by the city? How is this project supposed to be paid for? Why hasn’t there been a vote on this? This project might look pretty on paper, but it’s not practical for the type of businesses that these buildings can handle. If this is really just in the planning stages, why not come up with a plan that won’t hurt the businesses that we already have?

— Marla Kessel

Mountain Home