Parking construction costs still not set in stone
By JOHN F. MULLER Special to the Daily Press
CITY HALL — Officials here are eyeing 11 properties as possible pieces of a $250 million parking puzzle they hope will solve downtown’s problems in little more than a decade’s time.
When the plan was originally announced in 2002, the project was expected to cost $92.5 million.
The City Council authorized staff earlier this week to begin gathering information about properties on Fifth Street and on Broadway as potential sites for city parking structures. However, before the city can move towards purchasing any of the properties, staffers will have to report back to the council.
As to who will foot the estimated $250 million bill remains unclear, but the costs will most likely be passed on to motorists, developers and business owners in the downtown area, said Suzanne Frick, director of the planning department.
According to Frick, the $92.5 million plan to add nearly 2,000 parking spaces downtown through the addition of new parking structures, as well as the demolition and rebuilding of three of the 1960s-era downtown structures, did not take a variety of factors into account.
The plan, which will also upgrade 2,931 spaces, was signed off by the City Council in 2002 after a task force designed to address the shortage of downtown parking did nearly a year of research. City Hall hired a consultant for $150,000 to help the task force find potential parking places and figure out how to finance them.
Assistant City Manager Gordon Anderson said the project’s estimated cost has been driven up as property values have risen and officials have refined the city’s plans. For example, city officials are now looking into building a large amount of underground parking, which could substantially increase the cost of construction.
Anderson said City Hall also has taken a group of potential construction costs into account in the new estimate that it did not in the $92.5 million estimate, like soil treatment costs and the extra costs of building on relatively small sites. He said the original estimates were based more on industry standards, while recent numbers account for the city’s actual project.
“Whenever you start a construction project, there are a variety of estimates that float around as time goes on, and they usually don’t go down,” Frick said.
Both Frick and Anderson stressed that the estimates are far from set in stone. City officials are working on designs for new parking structures, and will only be able to put small parts of the larger plan into the yearly budget.
Miriam Mack, the city’s manager of economic development, said only about $13.8 million had been set aside in the city budget for the quarter-of-a-billion-dollar project.
City Councilman Herb Katz, who expressed concerns at a council meeting this spring that many of the properties initially identified have since been bought or are about to be, said City Hall has been moving as quickly as it can.
“It’s been moving slower than I had hoped, but I think the city had to go slowly,” Katz said. “We knew when we came up with the concept that we didn’t have the money right then — we knew that we were looking into a dream land, but one that had to be addressed.”
As to how City Hall could make ends meet for the plan, Frick said meter and parking rates could be raised; bonds could be issued or business owners could be charged for the creation of new parking.
The task force considered tacking on an extra 50 cents per square foot to existing properties in the downtown area and expanding the assessment district to include an additional 1.9 million square feet of commercial space. That district would stretch from north of Wilshire Boulevard to Colorado Avenue, and from Sixth Street to Ocean Avenue.
The task force reasoned that property owners would benefit from additional spaces and, therefore, should help pay for them. New commercial development in the Bayside District already pays into a shared parking fund and is not required to provide separate parking. The downtown area has seen about 50,000 square feet of growth each year in the past eight years.
There already are 5,180 spaces in 10 downtown garages, 1,085 private off-street spaces and 236 metered spots downtown.
Before the task force convened, City Hall asked the public through a telephone survey about downtown parking. The vast majority of residents said finding a parking space is difficult and nearly two-thirds thought it should be increased.
Research by the task force backed that sentiment up — there were 2.1 spaces per 1,000 square feet of commercial space. That’s considered low given the high proportion of retail, entertainment uses and the attraction of the Promenade, officials said. Most comparable cities have nearly twice the amount of spaces, according to city documents.
City Hall is currently doing an Environmental Impact Report on the plan, which should be completed within six months, Frick said. Construction will not begin until after that report is filed and millions of dollars are found, she said.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 31, 2004. Read the original PDF.