your_city_councilor t1_iye5tkk wrote on November 30, 2022 at 6:56 PM

Reply to comment by thisisntmynametoday in Paying Polar Park’s debt: For the second year, underwhelming tax collections were saved by a public property sale by outb0undflight

>Have you ever worked in the restaurant industry? Restaurants stay open for the hours that people show up.

Yes, I've spent years working in the restaurant industry. Restaurants change their hours around, experimenting to figure out what's best for attracting customers.

And the whole parking issue as an argument against Polar Park makes no sense to me. It's an argument for keeping the neighborhood unpopulated, aside from a couple of restaurants and bars that don't bring too many people. If parking is the issue, then the restaurants should petition the city to build a garage. One (at least) was built by the park already.

Lack of public transport is also an issue that can and should be addressed, but it's not an argument against the park, either. Worcester - including its businesses - either needs to resign itself to being a decaying mill town or it needs to be creative.

thisisntmynametoday t1_iyerab4 wrote on November 30, 2022 at 9:14 PM

If you’ve worked in a restaurant than you know having food service past 10pm is a way to barely break even during those hours and burn out BOH staff. And you would know that pregame hours in the early afternoon are usually slow as well. Money is made during weekends and dinner service, and having 75 days a year, including ~12 weekends a year with ballpark induced reductions in revenue is tough to recover from.

It you want to succeed in off hours, you need to be a bar, first and foremost. Worcester is nowhere near close enough to being an 18 hour city.

Business owners have repeatedly said parking is an issue, specifically the 2 hour limits on street parking without renewals and stringent parking enforcement. Businesses have said that their staff struggle to find parking, and face a lot of tickets.

The lack of parking in the neighborhood was an issue on weekends before the park, and it’s made far worse by adding in~9000 fans 75 days a year. The city closed a municipal lot on Green Street. That’s something that should have been addressed since the planning phase of the park. Building one garage in the second year of operations is a developer and city failure. Placing the burden on business owners to petition for basic levels of competency from developers and the city is incredibly myopic and condescending.

Scholarship has repeatedly shown that tax payer funded ballparks are a black hole, and not the economic saviors people think they are. Worcester just chose to ignore that and gave away millions of taxpayer funded bonds to the millionaire owners of a AAA team.

The only way out of this is a massive investment in public transport, walkable neighborhoods, and a series of parking options to help with the influx of visitors for games. Also, we need to kill the idea that outside developers have our best interests at heart. Build up and invest the community we have, not the outside investors the Chamber of Commerce has always tried (and failed) to help invest in our city.