Downtown Parking Garage Not in the Current Cards, Commission Learns

A parking garage in The Village has been on the La Mesa Community Parking Commission’s idea list for eight years. So in September, the City Council voted 5-0 to spend up to $43,000 on a downtown parking garage feasibility study.

On Tuesday, two consultants presented the study to the Parking Commission in the form of a 13-screen PowerPoint (see attached).

The upshot?

“The demand [for a parking garage] isn’t there to support it now,” said Bill Chopyk, city community development director.

Consultants Paul Marra of Keyser Marston Associates Inc. and Stephen Cook, a senior transportation engineer for Fehr Peers, told the commission that no specific site was identified downtown—but expected it to be east of Spring Street, near the Civic Center.

They crunched the numbers for a quarter-block and half-block parking structure—about 20,000 square feet and 40,000 square feet, respectively.

By their count, the consultants said The Village has 365 parking spaces—with demand for 279 spaces now, or 76 percent of occupancy after surveying parking between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Wednesday, Fridays and Saturdays.

“At no time did the parking demand exceed 76%” Cook told the four members present. (Commissioner Laura Lothian was absent.) “There was high demand on La Mesa Boulevard and on the side streets Palm, Third and Fourth, but we never saw complete occupancy on Lemon Avenue, Allison Avenue and surface lots in the area.”

So they ran calculations on how much extra density is needed to warrant a parking garage.

It would take an extra 50,300 square feet of new commercial development to reach a 13% increase to support a garage, or 77,500 square feet for a 20% increase, Cook said.

Four garage scenarios were offered—a two- or three-level garage on 40,600 square feet or a three- and 3½-level “concept” on 28,000 square feet. The larger site would accommodate 176 or 283 spaces. The smaller footprint would allow 146 or 182 spaces.

Not counting land costs, the cost per space would range from $23,500 to $37,500, they said. That would result in a garage ranging in price from $4.77 million to $6.65 million.

They also calculated what they called a financing deficit—the difference between the amount of money the city can raise from operating the garage and how much it would cost to build and maintain it.

“It’s a sizable number,” Marra said. “These numbers are quite large compared to the dollar cost. The revenue does not support … the dollar cost,” Marra said.

In a slide titled “Per Space Financing Deficit,” which didn’t count the cost of land, the consultants said the per-space shortfall would range from $16,900 to $35,000—depending on whether the garage hired people to accept parking fees or installed machines to accept money or credit cards.

For the whole structure, the deficit would thus range from $4.78 million to $5.4 million, the report said.

How would the city pay for a garage?

The consultants listed four options:

• Parking revenue bonds—with receipts helping pay off the bonds.
• Parking district revenues—from parking meters, parking permits and parking tickets.
• State and federal loans and grants.
• And parking in-lieu fees—which are charges levied on developers of new construction in The Village.

Of the in-lieu fee, Chopyk told the commission: “That’s something I’d like to take a look at. We could gain new development in the downtown commercial district and create that demand [for a parking garage]. Otherwise, the parking facilities we have now seem to serve the community well.

“That’s kind of what I take from the study. But financially we’re looking to the future. It really raises the question: What is the future of the downtown Village, and what is the future of La Mesa?”

La Mesa’s motto, he said, is to be the finest small town in San Diego County, and “as time goes on, our community needs to develop and redevelop, and we just need to address how we can best accommodate development.”

Jim Wieboldt, commission chairman, asked confirmation that the city wasn’t now collecting parking in-lieu fees, and Chopyk said no, but “our city manager has been interested in setting that up for quite some time, because when’s the last time you saw a new building built in downtown?”

Wieboldt said it was in the 1980s, with parking inside the building. Chopyk said he doubted that would be feasible today.

But in response to a question from Commissioner Lynn McRea, Chopyk said that if La Mesa began collecting in-lieu fees from new developers, “it would be raising the expectation … that you’re going to want to see the parking garage built … in some near future.

“You can’t wait around 10 or 20 years.”

Wieboldt told Marra: “Please express our sincere thanks to your team. You did a great job.”

Chris Gonzales, community development program coordinator, updated the panel on The Village parking district’s financial status.

It had $752,000 at the end of September, but after paying for police and community services—and subtracting a two-year reserve for operating budgets and $82,000 in overhead—the district account was left with a much lower figure, Gonzales said.

“When all is said and done,” he said, “if we had to write a check today, we could write a check in the amount of $218,000.”

With future growth in parking revenues, he said, the figure at the end of the fiscal year will be substantially greater.