Core parking shortage tackled
As surface parking in downtown Saskatoon disappears, city council should encourage private businesses to build parking garages and study other ways to increase spaces, the city’s planning committee agreed Tuesday.
The committee recommended that city council create tax incentives for downtown businesses to develop structured parking facilities and that it spend up to $200,000 to draft a comprehensive parking strategy.
“What we’re trying to do is get parking to be built up rather than out,” said Alan Wallace, the city’s director of planning and development.
Wallace blamed high costs of construction for the lack of parking garages in Saskatoon’s core and said proposed tax incentives would be a first step toward addressing that problem.
“Structured parking has become in the last (few) years extremely expensive; the cost has risen dramatically. You can find that as a deterrent,” Wallace told the planning committee.
“What we’re trying to do here is mitigate that deterrent somewhat.”
He said he hopes groups of people involved in downtown businesses will pool their resources to build shared parking facilities and enjoy tax benefits.
Mayor Don Atchison questioned whether bigger tax incentives could be offered to businesses prepared to build elevator parking facilities where cars are driven into a parking bay and then automatically lifted and parked once the driver leaves.
“Everyone tells me they’re too expensive, that land’s not expensive enough in Saskatoon, it doesn’t make it worthwhile,” Atchison said. “Well that’s fine for perhaps today, but for the future … I think we’d be in the leading edge there.”
Wallace said the current proposal offers the same tax incentives for businesses regardless of whether they build parking elevators or standard parking garages.
The city does not currently require downtown businesses to develop their own parking facilities. Wallace described the current situation as a “free-for-all” where many downtown employees — unable to find parking at work — use hourly meters intended for downtown customers.
Unless structured parking is built, the problem could get worse as the city starts encouraging businesses to develop office and retail spaces on surface parking lots, Wallace said.
Brent Penner, executive director of the downtown businesses improvement district, The Partnership, said he is encouraged by the committee’s recommendation and hopes council approves any measures to increase structured parking in the downtown.
“We are strong believers that structured parking will go a long way to filling a need,” he said.
Private parking garages will stop downtown employees from occupying parking meters all day and could even be opened up for additional paid evening and weekend parking, Penner said.
Duncan Mayer, research manager for Colliers real estate in Saskatchewan, agreed that implementing structured parking can solve the parking shortage problem in Saskatoon. However, he’s skeptical such development will occur, he said.
“The problem is, the cost of construction for parkades is just so much that there’s just not enough incentives for developers to develop these vacant lots. Certainly a tax break does have a strong effect on the viability of it, but it’s not enough on its own.”
Mayer said parking garages may only be viable if the cost of parking in downtown Saskatoon increases significantly.