A parking gate in Red Bank goes a little nutty Tuesday morning. The gate is at a 23-car parking lot at the corner of Hudson Avenue and Linden Place that’s owned by the borough but leased to Downtown Investors for use by employees of the nearby Smith Barney complex. (Click to enlarge)

The truck was there for half an hour, the reader wrote us, while two “healthy guys” moved boxes to a storage facility in the mall’s basement.

Your thoughts? (Click to enlarge)

[This article was updated with additional information at 5 p.m. Monday, September 20]

By JOHN T. WARD

The free exotic car show that drew hundreds of visitors to downtown Red Bank earlier this month may end up costing seven motorists $38 each.

Their vehicles were ticketed for parking faced in the wrong direction on a one-way street.

What led their drivers to think they could do so? A case of follow-the-leader for some, perhaps.

Among those who got tickets was Dominique Lallemand of Holmdel.

“I saw the other cars parked that way, and thought it must be OK because of the street fair,” she tells redbankgreen, who tracked her down from ticket information at the borough court. “I figured it must be OK.”

Though videos of the event show some of the display cars being driven the wrong way on one-way Mechanic Street – which was effectively closed by the shutdown of Broad  – during arrival and departure, there was no official sanction allowing cars to violate parking or other rules, police say.

“Traffic was never redirected,” Captain Darren McConnell, the department spokesman. “People took it upon themselves to come the wrong way down Wallace.”

McConnell said there were no barricades erected to stop cars from heading west on Wallace because it’s a one-way eastbound, with signage to that effect.

He added that no tickets were issued during the show because, with Wallace effectively closed off, the vehicles posed no hazard. But once Broad Street was reopened, around 7 p.m., those that remained presented a danger to cars traveling east from Broad.

But 22-year-old Matt DiBenedetto of Belford said he didn’t arrive on Wallace Street until 7:30 p.m. or so, after the car show was over. He turned in off Broad enroute to dinner at Gaetano’s, and seeing every car on the block facing the opposite way, made a U-turn to do the same.

“My girlfriend said, ‘You’re going to get a ticket.’ But I said, ‘Everybody’s parking this way. This must be what they want,” he told redbankgreen. “I said, ‘What are they going to do, give everybody a ticket?’

He said he was angry about the ticket, but won’t fight it. “I don’t want to pay it, but for what it’ll cost me in aggravation, it’s not worth it,” he said.

The only complaint the police department had heard as of Monday afternoon was from a merchant who said that not enough tickets were issued, McConnell said.

Lallemand won’t challenge the ticket either, she said.

redbankgreen spotted this plate on a car parked on Broad Street in downtown Red Bank Wednesday afternoon. Our satirical circuits were immediately overloaded.

LSD – once regarded by some as the ultimate escape from the Establishment – being touted on an uber-Establishment Cadillac? LSD is “Shore to Please?” Was the DMV tripping when the request for this tag came in?

Too many options. So we put it out there for followers of our Facebook page to offer up some captions. Here’s what they came up with:

Let’s hear what you’ve got… and if you haven’t visited the Facebook page, please give it a road test.

The service, which costs $10, is available on Friday and Saturday nights until 2 a.m. through September. The valet station is on Broad Street near Mechanic Street. (Photo below by Stacie Fanelli. Click to enlarge)

There soon could be fewer cars circling downtown Red Bank in search of parking spots if the borough council gives the green light to a proposal by Red Bank RiverCenter Wednesday night.

The business promotion agency, in an effort to pull in more visitors, hopes to try valet parking on a trial basis.

“It’ll benefit anybody whose customer doesn’t want to drive around or park themselves,” RiverCenter Executive Director Nancy Adams said.

Motorists who covet the six spaces on Broad Street that will be dedicated to the valet service might have a different take, however.

If the resolution is approved, the agency has a parking service lined up to station podiums on the east side of Broad Street, from Mechanic Street north to the next fire hydrant on Friday and Saturday nights. For $10, its employees will park a customer’s car in a municipal lot on Mechanic, Adams said.

Mechanic is a one-way from the east toward Broad, meaning a ride around the block to Globe Court for the valet.

The service would run from about 5 or 6 p.m. until early the next morning, she said.

RiverCenter will place signs advertising the service on Broad Street and in the White Street municipal lot, which often can become a merry-go-round of visitors hunting for an open spot.

Customers “can pull up and go anywhere in town and not have to worry about finding a parking spot,” Adams said. “It’ll benefit all the businesses in the district.”

Adams said the service, if approved by the council, could go into effect as soon as July 22, and would run as a three-month trial. If it’s popular and well-received, it could become a fixture in town, she said.

“Maybe it’s just for the summer months or just the winter months,” Adams said. “At least it’s something different that the downtown district is offering to its customers.”

The council meets at 6:30 p.m. tomorrow. Here’s a PDF file of the draft agenda to download: 7-13-11agenda

By DUSTIN RACIOPPI

Responding to “drama” in the redbankgreen comments section last week in which readers weighed in with speculation, history — or their version of it — and assorted posits about the repaving of the parking lot at Maple Cove, Red Bank officials took a break from Wednesday night’s regular order of business to clear the air. Fact check. Dispel the bloggy bosh.

To “try and shed some factual light,” said Mayor Pasquale Menna, “instead of just hypothetical speculation and gossip.”

Read on. Comment if you dare.

Borough Administrator Stanley Sickels put up a black-and-white schematic diagram of the Maple Cove parking area on an easel and went through a brief history of the site, which until last year had essentially been an unused area leading to the Navesink River.

The borough acquired the property in 1993, and soon after tried to determine the possibility was of putting in a boat launch at the site, Sickels said. The state Department of Environmental Protection put the kibosh on those plans, telling the borough it wouldn’t grant the necessary permits to install a launch because of the river’s shellfish resource restrictions.

“So the property sort of stayed in limbo,” Sickels said.

Some years later, in 2001, police determined the parking lot at the north end of Maple Avenue — what is now called Maple Cove — warranted permits, and implemented the system soon after, issuing 12 permits because that’s how many spots were available, Sickels said.

Construction of the Hovnanian Enterprises headquarters building just up the hill effectively ended the permit era at the lot. Sickels said the borough made a deal with Hov that, in exchange for using the lot as a staging area for construction, Hovnanian would cut a check to the borough. It did, for $17,000, with the agreement that the money would be used for future improvements at the parking lot.

Fast forward to today, and the $17,000 is being put toward the work redbankgreen reported on last week. Paving was scheduled to occur today.

Sickels said when the paving is done, there will again be 12 parking spots at the lot, two of them designated as handicapped spaces.

“The allegation on redbankgreen that we did away with 16 spaces” is false, Sickels said, referring to a reader comment.

One question that’s yet to be answered, though, is, with the return of parking spaces at the Maple Cove lot, will it take a permit to put your car there?

“That is something for the council to decide,” Menna said.

But for all the cyber chatter, he said Sickels’ presentation should put the speculation to bed.

“So, big drama,” he said. “The facts are pretty simple. Thank you.”

By DUSTIN RACIOPPI

Free parking may soon be a thing of the past at Maple Cove, Red Bank’s popular free launch for kayaks, canoes and rowing shells.

The borough, which is repaving a parking area at the site, may reinstate permit parking there, borough Administrator Stanley Sickels tells redbankgreen.

The lot had fallen into disrepair in recent years, with pavement cracking and buckling up in certain areas, Sickles said, and somewhere along the way, signs that noted a parking permit was required at the lot came down. Because of that, he said enforcement was relaxed and visitors to the foot of Maple Avenue have gotten away with free parking.

“They’ve got to pave first, and then we’ve got to decide if we’re going to put the signs back up,” he said.

The Maple Cove lot is one of the last on the borough’s list of streets and lots to be resurfaced under a program in last year’s budget, Engineer Christine Ballard said.

Other roads include Chestnut, Cedar, Park and Catherine streets, and Central Avenue, she said.

The borough will maintain the lot’s size and install one handicapped spot, Ballard said. She didn’t immediately have the total number of spots.

It’s unknown if and when the borough will make a decision on whether to reinstate the permit parking requirement.

“The main thing is just to get that repaved and safe right now,” Sickels said.

By DUSTIN RACIOPPI

Fair Haven’s police department is reluctant to go on a ticketing blitz downtown. But if business owners and employees keep camping at prime parking spaces, that’ll be the next course of action.

“It’s become an issue,” said Michele Berger, president of the borough’s business association, which has received complaints the last three months about owners and employees parking on River and Fair Haven roads all day. “People are asking: what are we going to do about it?”

Well, not much for now.

Police Chief Darryl Breckenridge said it’s an issue he’d rather see handled among the businesses — not because it’s a strain on the department to focus limited resources on enforcement of the downtown’s two-hour parking limit, but to give violators fair warning.

“We like them to police their own. When you’re ready, we’ll do it,” Breckenridge told the borough council Monday. “But to go write somebody a $70 ticket and they make $100 a day, it isn’t fair.”

The police department will send notices to area businesses this week reminding them of the borough’s parking time limits. If they continue spot-hogging, tickets may show up on their windshield.

Councilman Jerome Koch said it makes no sense for an owner or employee to tie up a space all day.

“I’ve always thought an employee or owner of a business would be smart to park as far away from their business and leave spots for the customers,” Koch said.