Council should OK Hillman Garage, City Dock plan

The garage must come down, and the water is coming up.

Those two fundamental facts offer Annapolis a unique opportunity to leverage one problem as a solution for the other and come out ahead.

That’s what Mayor Gavin Buckley’s administration hopes to do using custombuilt revenue authority legislation— dubbed a resiliency authority — to deal with both climate change and aging infrastructure.

It’s a bold, ambitious plan that, if successful, will make Annapolis a leader in creative solutions to these two problems increasingly common to American waterfront cities.

The next step is approval from the City Council. We urge the council to vote yes.

Last week, Buckley and city manager David Jarrel unveiled Annapolis Mobility and Resilience Partners as the consortium best suited to oversee and execute a project that will, in many ways, remake downtown

Annapolis.

The end result is intended to remove cars from the expanse of asphalt now at City Dock, replace it with a green that will become a programmable space that can absorb increasing tidal flooding.

Hillman Garage, an aging structure at the endof its life, will growto provide additional parking. The changewould give newenergy to the downtown waterfront.

City officials and AMRP representatives agreed to a $6.4 million predevelopment agreement earlier this month to begin planning the project in earnest. AMRP will design, build, finance, operate and maintain a new garage. It will also design, build and finance resiliency infrastructure at City Dock. Well, that’s the plan. Plans can go awry. Already, the price for this project has grown. Theballpark $50million figure cited whenthe conceptualwas unveiled is nowas much as $62.3million. Don’t be surprised if it is north of that astronomical figure by the time thework is done in 2024.

So, it’s an important safeguard that the plan includes several off-ramps for this project, the city’s largest-ever public works project. If the numbers on the garage don’t work, the city and the consortium can part ways. If the design doesn’t meet the city’s needs, the city and consortium can part ways.

Successful or not, this massive undertaking will be the legacy of Gavin Buckley. Yanking downtown Annapolis from its 1980s doldrums has been the biggest of his many, sometimes shifting vision for a more vibrant, inclusive city.

He has been fond of saying that if nothing changes at City Dock by the end of his first term, he won’t deserve a second four years in office. If the council approves this project, andwe reiterate that it should, it willbehard to stop no matter who wins inNovember.

That would fulfill the most ambitious of his promises, even if the result won’t be completed until the end of a second term.

A lesser vision here would pursue a simple rebuild on the garage and hope something like building seawalls to address climate change-driven flooding would be enough. Thatwould be the wrong strategy.

Even if this project is successful, it will only be the first of many endeavors necessary to save low-lying parts of the city fromflooding.

There will be problems ahead, as well, not the least of which is another year during the project when the impact on the boat shows will be extreme.

Yet the fact remains that this solutionwill — if the planning stage goes as hoped — resolve this set of problems in tandem without putting more on the backs of Annapolis taxpayers.

There’s ample reason tomove ahead.