Clayton DDA approves Lease and updates Parking

A revised lease for Wilson Alley and updates on parking lots highlighted the monthly board meeting of the Clayton Downtown Development Authority (DDA) on Tuesday afternoon in the city courtroom.  Vaughn Rogers, who serves on the Clayton DDA and oversaw the meeting, gives details about the lease for Wilson Alley. “The city submitted us a lease and we revised it and sent it back to them. They made one change and brought it back to us and we felt like it was a good lease, so we voted on it.”  The revised leased was unanimously approved by the Clayton DDA; however, more discussion is planned on parking, adds Rogers. “We didn’t decide on that. One of the things that the city wanted us to do and put in the lease is that we charge for those parking spaces that we are creating on Wilson Alley, so we agreed to that and we’ll decide at a later time how it is best feasible to do that.  We want to be fair to all the business owners and give everybody equal opportunity to have one of those parking spaces but we will have to decide how to do it. It may be that we have 12 spots and we only have 12 people that want them and if that is the case then we don’t have to do anything but lease it to them. But if there are 15 wanting those 12 then we have to figure out a way to make it fair for each business owner to have a spot.”  Updates were also given on two parking lots, continues Rogers. “The one behind U Joint was given to us by the city a number of years ago, I don’t know what year it was but it is on record and that has been for public parking but we are getting a lot of complaints from business owners that there is not enough parking on Main Street for their customers. Some of their employees park on Main Street and some of them park in that DDA parking lot and we are just trying to encourage all the business owners on the northside of town that use that parking lot to encourage their employees to park in that gravel parking lot on the other side of Church Street that the city owns and allow customers to park in the parking lot immediately behind U Joint.  The other parking lot that we talked about that we are going to build is on Wilson Alley behind the old Dickerson Hardware and we were able to possibly create 12 parking spaces and then we agreed with the Dickerson family when we got the property that we would set up a little park and put in memory of Mr. Dickerson because he was a long-time business owner in Clayton. Then we are also going to eventually get a brick sidewalk down to Church Street that would come out close to the courthouse parking lot, so after hours when people can park there they will have a pathway up to Main Street.” The Clayton DDA plans to give further updates on the parking lots as they progress with construction.