The City Council’s Public Safety & Transportation Committee meeting recently recommended a working group be assembled to tackle the pressing problem of the city’s parking ban, which voters came close to scrapping completely last fall.

And committee Chair Tarik Lucas has delivered. In a letter to the full council and the mayor, the at-large councilor from Ward 2 announced his picks for that working group.

Former City Councilor Chris Markiewicz, who served on the council from 2018 to 2023, will serve as chair of the Overnight Parking Ban Working Group,

The rest of the line-up is as follows:

• Jini Fairley, former ADA coordinator for the City of Newton
• Mitch Fischman, former city councilor and current Traffic Council member
• Michael Halle, chair of the Transportation Advisory Group;
• Richard Heald, strategy and marketing consultant
• Peter Klapes, law student who served as Co-Director of the Repeal the Ban ballot committee last year
• Howard Rosenof, retired engineer who served as treasurer of the Keep the Ban ballot committee last year

“We wanted people from the ‘yes’ campaign, the ‘no’ campaign” Lucas said. “We wanted someone from the Transportation Advisory Group. We wanted someone from Traffic Council. And we just wanted it as broad as you can with seven people, a broad representation of opinions, on the working group. And I think we have achieved that.”

The group is tasked with making recommendations to the City Council regarding what to do about overnight parking in Newton. The city’s current ban is only a couple sentences long and covers a city of 13 distinct villages and nearly 89,000 residents.

Last year, as momentum for repealing the ban was building, councilors in favor of keeping the ban offered to work on a compromise overnight parking policy if voters kept the current ban and gave them time.

Ideas floated have included alternating parking between the even and odd side of  the streets so people don’t leave their cars on the street for days, having the ban stay in place in parts of the city while other parts allow parking overnight, and some kind of parking permit system that covers guests, to name just a few.

Now, the working group is in place to sort that out and come up with some viable plans from which to choose.

“They’ll give us options, give us recommendations, things that we can implement on a one-year trial basis,” Lucas said.

The parking ban was perhaps the most talked about issue of last year’s election season, and voters narrowly saved it from the chopping block by fewer than a hundred votes  (11,113 to 11,032).