Dear Council President Maher and Councilmembers:
Thank you again for reaching out to the South Post Road (SPR) residents to hear about our concerns with respect to the many summer events and September festivals held in Mercer County Park. As always, we appreciate your continued support in attending meetings to discuss our issues with the Mercer County Park Commission and with Police Chief Joe Pica.
Thankfully, we see some improvement with heavy traffic and the township traffic advisory in advance is very beneficial.
Overall, we still need help with noise. I’ve condensed the many issues gathered from the neighborhood into three main categories:
Early Morning Noise: Some events do mic/sound checks much earlier than the actual event. For example, the Ironman event started making loud announcements at approximately 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Loud music started to play at 6:45 a.m. and continued all day long. Unfortunately, music with a loud bass does vibrate our windows.
Late Night Noise and Bright Lights: The summer concert series and the softball game announcements over the PA system are loud. The MC Park website states that the park is open until sunset. With the addition of stadium lights the park events continue well past 10 p.m. on almost every spring/summer/fall weekday and weekend. Most importantly, fireworks prior to 9:30 p.m. would be preferred.
Traffic: We still experience speeding traffic on our roadway during events, but the park ranger’s presence is helping. SPR noticed that sometimes rangers were assigned and other times not so. As a neighborhood, we do not want tour buses/RVs/construction vehicles on our roadway. We have no shoulder and no sidewalks. Basically, our roadway is not designed to safely handle anything but residential traffic. Again, a consideration for speed bumps is requested.
SPR does not know the status of the amphitheater, but in a meeting with the MC Park Commission, it was promised that during the county budget hearings our request for trees and light shields would be considered.
In advance, we appreciate your efforts and our neighborhood looks to your continued help in resolving these matters.
Teresa Lourenco
South Post Road
