The city will negotiate with the company that owns Grandin Park Plaza for use of its 240-stall parkade to provide additional parking in the downtown.
Mayor Nolan Crouse announced at Monday’s council meeting that he had been in touch with Amacon, which owns the mall, and said the company is happy to allow the city to use the parkade.
“All they want is no muss, no fuss and no liability,” Crouse said. “They’re willing to turn it over to the city with those three things in mind.”
The three-level parkade, which contains approximately 120 stalls per level, currently sits unoccupied for the most part, with the exception of some mall employees or patrons. Access to the third level has been closed off.
“Amacon said they would like us to start with the parkade and see where it goes,” Crouse said, adding the company was not willing to entertain allowing surface parking at this time in other areas around the mall.
Council voted 7-0 to approve negotiations for a parking agreement with Amacon and report back to council if there would be any cost to the city.
The discussion took place on the heels of a report from administration detailing the difficulty with parking downtown. Guy Boston, general manager of planning and engineering, said staff had identified two locations for a potential surface parking lot — one on city-owned land on 22 St. Thomas St. and another at Millennium Park.
Those recommendations came after the city, in partnership with the chamber of commerce, conducted a survey of downtown businesses about how they felt about parking in the area. The results showed that it was not customers occupying most of the stalls at the large Perron District parking lot across from St. Albert Place, but employees of different downtown businesses, as well as the city.
“Regardless of what we do create in this parking lot, there will always be a case where the demand will exceed the supply,” Boston said.
That’s a change from the last time businesses were surveyed five years ago when the consensus was the bulk of parking was for customers. Now businesses are more concerned about having employees having somewhere to park.
Boston presented two ideas — the first was a surface lot at 22 St. Thomas St. where individuals who worked downtown could pay a monthly fee for a guaranteed parking spot. The other was to pave a large section of Millennium Park where city employees would have access to St. Albert Place, clearing out more stalls from the central lot currently designated for city staff.
Both sites have potential problems — 22 St. Thomas St. is listed in the downtown area redevelopment plan (DARP) as a location for a future civic building, and the future realignment of St. Anne Street in DARP would impact the Millennium Park lot.
Staff parking also poses a problem — of approximately 140 designated for city employees at the central lot, the St. Albert Curling Club and the Hemingway Centre, there are more parking passes distributed to staff than there are stalls, which can lead to overflow problems.
“We’ve caused some of this problem,” Coun. Cathy Heron said.
Crouse however warned council against blaming city employees for the dearth of parking in the general lot.
“I can assure you that … our staff are very considerate of this issue,” he said. “They are at the curling rink, at the old Petro Canada site. Unless you have evidence, I don’t know that it’s fair.”
