Colorado restaurant owners in Morrison at odds with town trustees over parking rules, comment about "terrible" food
Over the last couple of years, Morrison has received a reputation where a traveler could very easily leave the Colorado town with a speeding or a parking ticket. But now restaurant owners are sounding the alarm and asserting that the town's Board of Trustees aren't taking the negative reputation seriously enough.
For 35 years, Tony Rigatoni's has been a fixture on one of the busiest corners of Morrison. Gary Conte and Reza Aldehali have been business partners for that time and estimate that they've contributed roughly $2 million in taxes to the town's coffers. While there's been challenges at time with the Board of Trustees, the duo have worked hard to keep Morrison home for their business. During the pandemic, when paid parking became a suggestion in downtown, they were all for the change.
"What we did see was people were parking all day in town and tying up a parking spot," Conte explained.
But very quickly, the solution became a new problem. Where some towns -- Conte and Aldehali say -- have between 60 and 90 minutes of parking time windows, Morrison's is closer to 30 minutes. For restaurants, that creates a small window for diners and a greater possibility that they'll leave an establishment and find a ticket on their car.
"(The Board) went too far and now you only get a half hour and so if we could meet somewhere in between," suggests Conte. "We can't serve people in a half hour."
Those issues boiled over at a town meeting on Jan. 7 during a discussion regarding the potential creation of a new parking lot in town. As Aldehali mentioned some of the general parking concerns in town, Trustee Paul Sutton took aim at the restaurants themselves and suggested their food was the reason their businesses were suffering.
"The food is not very good," Sutton said. "This town is empty in the winter. There's plenty of parking. I come and eat at the restaurants once a year and go why did I do that? The food is terrible."
Restaurant owners at the meeting, which included Conte and Aldehali, left in protest. Calls and emails to Morrison's town manager for comment went unreturned. Krista Gaasvig, the owner of the Hungry Goat restaurant down the street from Tony Rigatoni's, wasn't at the meeting but heard about the outburst later.
"I was actually just shocked," she said. "I thought what a terrible way to deflect what the actual issue is."
Restaurant owners say that the compromise is a wider parking window similar to what nearby Jefferson County municipalities like Golden or Arvada have.
"We are not represented," said Aldehali. "We have no representation on what we bring to the table."
Gaasvig showed CBS Colorado printouts of negative Yelp reviews, the very ones that Sutton referenced as evidence that the food isn't good. What some one-star reviews were about painted a different picture.
"They have to do with parking," Gaasvig said.
That next trustee meeting is Jan. 21, and restaurant owners say they hope that there will be an apology or some type of acknowledgement of wrongdoing by Sutton and that, at least, a solution to the parking issue can be found collaboratively between those running the town and those running the businesses within it.
