Anthony Costanzo, who owns the Rhode Island Billiards Bar & Bistro on Smith Street next to Town Hall, says that as long as he can remember, he’s had a problem with people using his parking lot to go to other businesses on the street.

The Providence Journal / Richard Dujardin

NORTH PROVIDENCE — A local businessman is asking the town to help him stop the public from treating the lot at his Centredale business as a public parking lot.

Anthony Costanzo, who owns the Rhode Island Billiard Bar & Bistro on Smith Street next to Town Hall, says that as long as he can remember, he’s had a problem with people using his parking lot to go to other businesses on the street.

“I pay $4,600 a year in taxes, and what do I get in return? People parking in my lot.”

Costanzo went before the Town Council on Tuesday to help him find a solution. Though most of his business traffic is in the evening, at a time when other local businesses are closed, he said the problem becomes especially acute on Friday nights when many of his customers arrive and find they can’t find a place to park.

At the council meeting, members asked if he had ever tried to put up “patrons only” signs. The signs are there, he said, but people ignore them. Has he tried towing cars? Yes, he said, but it’s not something he really wants to do. He once towed seven cars and later found out that one of the cars towed was one of his regular customers who was getting a haircut.

Costanzo said he has even gone to neighboring businesses to ask them to lease some of the parking spots for their customers. And while two establishments did agree to pay him $50 a month each, he said, those two have since gone out of business while the other businesses have refused to cooperate at all.

“One of them told me, ‘It’s always been a community parking lot, so why should they pay?’ Well, it’s not a community lot. It’s mine.”

Council members said they would try to hold a meeting on the problem with the mayor and a couple councilmen.

However, Mayor Charles Lombardi, when reached yesterday, said he believes that the town has already done its share in addressing Costanzo’s parking problem.

Lombardi said that when he first came into office, Costanzo complained to him that town employees were treating his parking lot as a town lot and asked for some relief.

He says that he and Costanzo agreed that if he paved the lot — which Costanzo said cost $18,000 — the town would pay him $400 a month to lease eight spaces. As part of the swap, Costanzo’s customers could avail themselves of the Town Hall parking spaces after the Town Hall closed.

As part of the effort to open up more parking spaces for the businesses in Centredale, town employees were directed to park either at the rear of Town Hall or on a side lot in the back, not in front. And the pressure was eased this summer, the mayor said, when the town’s Planning Department and inspections division moved to new offices next to the police and fire headquarters, freeing up another five or six spaces around the building.

“I really am perplexed as to why he would be coming to us now,” Lombardi said. “We can’t be in the business of subsidizing private parking lots. If we did it in Centredale, we would have to do it for parking lots all over town. We can’t afford to do that. And we can’t afford to buy his land, and we can’t give him a tax break either.”

Costanzo said yesterday that he’s not asking the town to buy the lot or to pay him any more money than it is paying now.

“All I’m asking is that they help find a solution. I don’t know what that solution is now.”

rdujardi@projo.com