Prior to the year 2000, there was a zoning transect in affect that basically dealt with parking requirements for new building. For every unit or square footage you needed so many parking spots. Many of the condos have their own parking on the ground floor of the units. Some of the condo’s built after 2000 even put the parking in as a measure of not impacting downtown parking spaces. However, it was the idea of some developers that tenants would park on the street at night and would be gone during the day (working or whatever). The code was also eliminated to encourage downtown growth by eliminating the need to provide using building space for parking.
Today if you build in certain areas of the City the parking rule is enforced or if you alter an existing building for certain new businesses you will need to provide x number of parking spaces per square foot of the building. This does not pertain to the rumored movie theater going up where the old Price Chopper was located. The new parking garage will serve as tenant parking and theater parking spots.
While we desperately need a new parking garage downtown and the new one on
Woodlawn Avenue
is a nice one, it still gives us only a net of 200 spaces and the top deck will not be used in the winter. The cost for the 200 parking spaces will end up costing $30,000.00 each.
My only disappointment with the decision by the Mayor’s Committee is why didn’t you use more property to extend the parking garage therefore create more parking spaces? Granted it would have been a little more expensive but with all the equipment in place there already and seeing how fast the garage was assembled, one would think that gaining more parking spots would be a little more palatable than having a net 200 and 187 of them being used by the new condo tenants across the street.
We know this Mayor will not act to propose that the Planning Board consider enacting the transect that was eliminated in 2000; we can only hope that a new Mayor will have the smarts to think about doing this.
Where do you get your figures from? How did you arrive at a net of 200?
ReplyDeleteAnd they aren't condos, they are apartments.
the original parking garage was going to have only two levels of parking, similar to the other two garages. But when Sonny realized he didn't have enough spaces for his tenants, he got his friend Tom Roohan to push for more levels of parking, and he got his wishes granted.
Sorry, I stand corrected, not condos but apartments, thanks for the correction. Yes, the garage was supposed to be only 2 levels but extend wider. If you take the number of parking spaces that the two lots had and subtract the number of spots the garage has you will come up with a net of 200 additional spots
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry for my haste in posting yesterday that there will only be a net of 200 parking spaces. After checking with sources today, the net figure is more like 325, a far greater number than the 200 I said yesterday. That makes the cost per net space a little less than $18,500. Current plans are still not to use the top deck in the winter or at least until we get snow. However, that may change also, who can figure?
ReplyDelete