Parking garage plan raises some hackles

Abattle is brewing over an effort by the Oklahoma City Police Association to build a parking garage that would overlook Bicentennial Park.

Neighbors and urban advocates argue it’s simply a bad idea to create space for cars across from a park. Even the Police Association admits the site at 601 W Main is not their first preference.

Another site soon will be available just west of the Civic Center Music Hall. The block is currently home to closed police headquarters and soon-to-close municipal courthouse. The area is in desperate need of parking and a plan by the city to build a surface parking lot on the site will result in no parking for courthouse or police department visitors.

A garage on this site makes sense. The city can make it happen by doing a deal with the Police Association. The Police Association even drew up plans and made a pitch for the site before hitting resistance by city staff and moving on to the contested site across from the park.

Why won’t the original deal work?

I spoke to City Manager Jim Couch, who is essentially the CEO of the city with the heart of an engineer. He said he wouldn’t do the deal because the association, a nonprofit, wanted the city to participate in the garage cost by picking up parking for police vehicles.

Currently the police fleet is parked in a surface parking lot along Main Street along with more expensive bomb squad fleet, crowd control towers and other equipment. The lot is surrounded by an ugly blue metal fence and whatever is parked in the lot is exposed to sun, rain, hail and wind.

According to Ed Hill, president of the Police Association, the cost

pitched to the city to park the approximately 150 cars would be $90 a month over the 20-year payoff of the debt used for construction.

Do the math and the cost comes about to about $3.24 million. The cost for the city to build the surface lot on the same site, parking that will leave the public no place to park, will be $1.5 million.

The police parking lot and the neighboring parking lot owned by the Police Association, meanwhile, could, in my estimation, attract offers of up to $2 million or more in what is now a hot property market in west downtown.

Add in saved costs from damage to the police fleet by storing it in the garage, and on my calculator, the city could end up with a garage that is needed in the police and courts complex, spare the city the expense

of building the garage, and avert what is seen as a bad garage location across from Bicentennial Park.

So why can’t this deal move forward?

Let’s start with who did the talking —Hill and Couch. Neither can say he knows all the ins and outs of real estate. The Urban Renewal Authority, The Alliance for Economic Development and the Oklahoma City Planning Department are set up to deal with real estate and doing public-private transactions.

But did Couch made a policy decision not to let the real estate experts try to put the deal together. The discussion between Couch and Hill consists of about an hour in early 2016. The talks did not involve possible land swaps that could cover the parking costs objected to by the city.

But even if such a deal was doable, Couch remains opposed. He can’t justify helping a potential competitor build a parking garage when two nearby city garages are running below capacity. If a garage is needed in the police and courts complex, he responds that the city would build it. But he also acknowledges the Central Oklahoma Transportation and Parking Authority is set to be maxed out on bonding capacity for new construction.

The Arts District and Sheridan Walker garage are indeed running well below capacity, which makes one wonder why the police association is so gung ho on the site across from the park, which is very close to those two garages. Do the association members realize they risk a financial blood bath with

this spot?

The spot in the police and courts complex is pretty far removed and isolated from those other garages, though it would indeed compete with the Arts District Garage for Civic Center patrons. But the spot also would fill a pretty bad void in public parking for those visiting the police headquarters and municipal courthouse.

The new surface parking lot, as of now, is set to be closed to the public and only a handful of curbside parking spaces will survive.

Hill is moving forward with the plans for a garage across from a park —a site he admits is not his first choice. Not one neighbor in the area wants the garage, and all but one have signed a petition urging the Downtown Design Review Committee to block the project.

Some of the most respected urban developers in the city have spoken against the park site. The site is seen as flawed in a report by planning staff. And if city staff were to sincerely reopen talks on the original site, the Police Association might just pull back from its second choice.

The original site provides the public with parking where it is needed, would free up surface lots for development along Main Street, and potentially save the city money.

In the real estate world, this deal is a no-duh. Only at City Hall, where police and engineers attempt to dabble in matters outside their expertise, does this sort of thing end up with a second choice that puts cars and not people across from a showcase urban park.