Of Stupidity and Selfishness

Fiola: Don't panic about parking
in downtown Fall River
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By Kevin P. O’Connor
Herald News Staff Reporter

Posted May 11, 2010 @ 09:27 PM
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FALL RIVER — When the time comes to leave your car somewhere downtown for your day in court, the city has some simple advice:

Don’t panic, peruse.

“There is plenty of parking downtown,” said Kenneth Fiola, the city’s parking czar. “We have been keeping an eye on this for months now.

“Perception is becoming reality. People believe there is no parking. But you just have to take a look around. There is.”

Fiola, the executive director of the Fall River Office of Economic Development, has been taking increasing heat over the past few months as the Fall River Justice Center, 186 S. Main St., prepares to open for business.

The facility was built by the state and will house county courts, but government officials decided that parking for the structure was a city problem.


The new courthouse has 15 parking spaces. Ten of those are promised to judges. Court officials estimate the court will add 200 to 300 cars a day to the streets around downtown.


No new parking has been added.


Nor is it needed, Fiola said.

“I’ve been keeping an active eye on the on-street and active parking around the courthouse,” he said. “There is plenty of it.

“I know no one wants to hear this, but this will sort itself out. There is enough parking. This isn’t a severe problem.”


Fiola gave a tour last week, looping through the Pearl Street parking garage and weaving through the streets of Corky Row right behind the new courthouse, pointing out long stretches of empty curbs with unused parking meters at the ready.


The entire fourth level of the parking garage on Pearl Street was empty, as were most of the second and third levels of the parking garage on Third Street.

The same was true Tuesday, with 100 empty spots in the Third Street garage and 125 empty spots in the Pearl Street garage. There were at least another 100 metered spots available on both Tuesday and Friday on Pearl Street, Second Street and Borden Street. At the flat lot at Borden and Fourth Streets, half the 110 spots were empty.


Of course, parking downtown has been a challenge since Americans began relying on automobiles as the first choice in local transportation. The downtown district, built before cars were common, has struggled to accommodate them.

“It is a common complaint of my customers, that there is no place to park,” said Don Facchiano, the cobbler located at the corner of Columbia Street and South Main Street. “This has gone on forever.

“When the courthouse opens, it will be even worse. It has to be.”


“I’ve worked on this street for 46 years. Parking just keeps getting worse,” said barber Al DeMatos of Alvaro’s Hair Salon, 348 S. Main St., right across the street from Facchiano’s.


“The city has had opportunities to purchase property around her for parking and it never did,” DeMatos said. “Every administration in city hall has been blind to the needs of downtown.”


One proposal has been to change most of the meters on Second Street and Pearl Street to allow five hours of parking to accommodate those going into the court. Ida Andrade, the owner of Tavares Bakery, 411 Second St., hopes the city proceeds cautiously with that plan.


“If they change all the meters from two hours to five hours, that will hurt me,” she said. “I hope they will leave some two-hour meters near me.


“I’m a block away from the courthouse. I don’t know if it will give me any walk-in trade, but I know I’ll lose business if people can’t park right outside.


“People want convenience.”


But some people will have to accept walking a few blocks when they have to do business in the courts, Fiola said. The city is looking at putting together a parking map to be available through the courts. The city will also meet with court officials this week to discuss where jurors will park when they report for duty.


One plan is to pave over the entire lot at the former N.B. Borden School, at the corner of Morgan and Whipple Street, to use it for juror parking. That lot is about a quarter mile from the new courthouse.


The city’s position, Fiola said, is that it is reasonable to expect people to walk a quarter mile, about two blocks, to get to court.


And there is an upside to that, at least for one business. People walking back and forth to court will wear out their sneakers and hiking boots faster.


“Hopefully, I’ll fix those shoes,” Facchiano, the cobbler, said.
E-mail Kevin P. O’Connor at koconnor@heraldnews.com

Stupid is as Stupid does? Dumb and Dumberer?  Help me, I lost my mind and can't remember where I left It?  Stupid people shouldn't breed? I just can't pick the one that best seems to apply. Maybe they all do.

We are being taken on a wonderful journey through the great and vast expanses of that low barren flatland known as the mind of FROED'S Executive Vice President  Ken Fiola . There are no rivers, streams or lakes. No hills or mountains or grassy green lush valleys. No forests or even rock formations in which to go splunking. No, there is only a barren wasteland of almost desert-like territory. There's nothing around to even produce an echo. No, just the vast enjoyable space of blank nothingness in the mind of Ken Fiola. How do we know? WE just listen to him. Then we know for sure.

"“There is plenty of parking downtown,” said Kenneth Fiola, the city’s parking czar. “We have been keeping an eye on this for months now.
“Perception is becoming reality. People believe there is no parking. But you just have to take a look around. There is.”"

Everytime this dullard opens his mouth we are left with that quesy feeling in the pit of our stomachs that we have truly bought a pig in a poke with our close to $200,000 a year in salary and benefits. The best thing he's managed to do in all the time I've lived in Fall River is hold a cardboard check at the announcment of a grant to clean up City Pier. No really, he didn't even fall off the pier or anything!

That's Ken Fiola way over on the left. Who says you can't hire ex-Durfee basketball palyers!

Clutch work Kenny, Clutch!

But this current folly might be his, and FROED'S, greatest screw up! And that's really saying something. WE even have proof. This is a debacle of biblical proportions.

You see, there is no proof currently available that Ken Fiola and FROED ever applied for a T.I.G.E.R. grant for a parking facility or parking relief of some sort for this Central Business District (CBD) butchering Downtown Courthouse facility. (I refuse to call this ugly edifice "the Justice Center"...no justice was done in the planning , construction or current existence of this place, and never shall it be!). T.I.G.E.R. grant application files and awards have been examind. There is no proof this clown ever applied for a single such grant. But he CLAIMS he did. He's done that publicly.

This is Ken Fiola's normal brain activity...barren and empty

So in a singularly and mindblowingly unfathomable exhibition of blatant stupidity reserved only for hack hires in the City of Fall River, Mr. Fiola continues to assert that the search for available parking spaces for the new courthouse "will work itself out". Yeah Kenny, that's what they said about the Great Depression. That only took 10 years to sort out.

Ken Fiola's mind when talking without thinking:

Note the empty spaces causing brainfarts

Fiola has been strangely silent on the issue of wheteher or not he DID so apply for grants for a parking facility for the Courthouse. It's a silence that is very telling coming from a man known as "The Weeper" for defending himself so vigorously when challanged. This does not portend good things for parking in the downtown area which was in terrible shape PRIOR to the new courthouse being placed smack-dab in the middle of the CBD.

What was Fiola doing as the legend of the dullard from FROED continued to grow? He was out in Chi-town at a taxpayer paid road trip to attend a conference dedicated to the Bio-Tech industry, FROED'S other great mission of the damned to screw up Fall River for generations. WE know it affectionately as the Fiola Ebola Bob-Bon Factory and Death Defying Thrill Ride Park. The members of the FROED Board of Directors and the FR Chamber of Commerce call it "Honey, order steak tonight, I got a sucker on the line big-time" and kid's college tuition fund. Guess who'll pay the most into this fund?...YOU guessed it, it's YOU!!!  Their attitude is, "Hey, enjoy what quasi-government and private sector organizations are doing for you!" But I digress...that's a subject for another day!

For far too long this City has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars down the FROED sinkhole. It literally has nothing to show for this expenditure of funds. At a time of absolute municipal budget crisis, how can continuing to spend big bucks for nothing be justified, especially when we may be cutting Police, Fire, School Teachers and Support Staff and DPW yet again. It is an unconscionable and taxpayer mockery that FROED continues to operate in a way that produes nothing yet tells us that everything is just fine, that "things will work themselves out." They will not just work themselves out, they never do in Fall River, or anywhere for that matter.

I blame the powers that be that allow some unqualified "attorney" named Ken Fiola to stumble, bumble and now mumble his way through our tax dollars with nothing to show for it. The only way this guy keeps his job is because he's doing the bidding of the Karam Harem and the big time supporters of Mayor Flanagan. After all, Mayor Flanagan is the Chairman of the FROED Board of Directors. Yet he too remains strangely silent on FROED's and Fiola's utter failure to produce anything for the money they eat up each year, year in and year out.

Sorry Will Flanagan, it's all on your back. Everytime this brain dead fool Fiola says that the downtown parking situation "will work itself out", your the one who'll get the public kick in the keister. And that's the right thing. You can stop all this and you do nothing to do so! Man, only 5 months into your term and your true colors are coming to light. You seem to be no better than the man you replaced. You might even be worse, because Correia never tried telling everyone he was other than he was - an old fashioned power politician. You ran telling everyone you'd be different. You are not and you are surrounded by small minded, power hungry cretins like your self.  The truth of your administration displays itself more with each day that passes. There is no grand vision here for Fall River's survival. There is only tunnel vision for personal financial and political agendas. So typically sad for this City that needs legitimate and selfless leaders more than the  phlanx of would be Elmer Gantry's with which it has been cursed.

Ken Fiola, astride his parking space bereft downtown,

like a dullard Colossus

To paraphrase a quote from Mr. Fiola from this article, "Perception is becoming reality. People believe FROED and FIOLA do nothing. But you just have to look around. They don't."

I wonder whose time is running out faster, FROED and Fiola's or Fall River's ?