Happy Holidays, or “Bah Humbug,” depending on your position regarding the city’s winter overnight parking ban.

The Newton City Council on Monday night voted to shorten the ban, but not before councilors showed that parking policy passions still rage nearly a year after the city’s voters narrowly–by less than a third of a percentage point–opted to keep the winter overnight parking ban in place.

“The winter parking ban is not about ensuring effective snow removal, though that’s really important,” Councilor Alison Leary, who voted against shortening it, said. “It’s a policy decision about managing the impacts of motor vehicles in our community.”

For more than an hour, councilors debated the proposal—one of multiple ideas discussed by a working group organized by Public Safety & Transportation Chair Tarik Lucas—to shorten the length of the ban so that it starts on Jan. 2, 2027, instead of Dec. 1 of this year, and ends on March 15. It would be a trial, for this winter season only.

That proposal passed on a 9-14 vote, so this season, the ban doesn’t start until after the holidays.

But Lucas himself refused to support the idea because there’s still no specific plan for monitoring the results of a trial.

Leary recommended sending the item back to committee, and Councilor Randy Block made a motion to do so, but that motion failed after many said they wanted to do something that night. Even Councilor Jacob Silber, who had a list of concerns about easing the ban, refused to support sending it back to committee until they discussed the ban more that night.

“I want you to all share the pain for a little bit longer,” Silber said. “I would actually entertain a motion to move it back to committee, but not yet.”

“Yeah I don’t know what to do with that, necessarily,” Council President John Oliver said.

At one point, Councilor Susan Albright called out her colleagues’ parking privilege. Most live in single-family houses with off-street parking.

“I was looking around the room as we were talking, and I don’t think that any of us here have a problem with a place to put a car so I’m hoping that we have a little bit of empathy for the folks in Newton who don’t have a place to put a car and suffer through this parking ban,” Albright said.

And Councilor Becky Grossman of Ward 7 pushed back on that, saying she remembers city living and can’t imagine trying to manage her life and family without a car or a place to park it. But, she added, new housing developments are being built all over the city that put an added strain on the city’s already stressed parking situation.

Grossman called out advocates of housing density who also want to lift the overnight parking ban.

“We hear from a lot of voices, many of the same voices who are asking us to do away with our overnight parking ban, that many families are very happy to live in Newton without a car, to live car-light, don’t need a car, and that residences that we would be adding to the city that do not have parking will attract people who, by definition, don’t need a car,” Grossman said. “And if that’s true, to my mind, that should be true for all of these existing situations where folks don’t have a place to park a car, and now would like us to provide free parking.”

In fact, Grossman said, parking shouldn’t be free.

“I think that cars in general in society have a negative externality on the the public benefit, and that if one wants to use our public way or public resources to park a car, there should be a cost to that, and should make one thoughtful about whether that’s a decision they want to make or not,” she said.

Debate went on through the night until Block brought forth a compromise: start the ban on Jan. 2 but keep it until the end of March rather than March 15, and allow the mayor to lift the ban any time after March 15 if weather permits.

That amendment failed to get enough votes, too. The main proposal to shorten the ban breezed through a vote immediately after.

ROLL CALL

“Yes” votes: Susan Albright, Martha Bixby, Brittany Hume Charm, Cyrus Dahmubed, Stephen Farrell, Brian Golden, Maria Greenberg, Julie Irish, David Kalis, Andrea Kelley, Joshua Krintzman, David Micley, Sean Roche, Jacob Silber.

“No” votes: Lisle Baker, Randy Block, Rena Getz, Lisa Gordon, Becky Grossman, Alison Leary, Tarik Lucas, Julia Malakie, John Oliver.