The Gazette reported in its Oct. 17 edition that the E.J. Gare Parking Garage will either need extensive and expensive major renovations or be replaced entirely. According to this article, the garage has “concrete cancer” and the costs to repair the garage would be $2.5 million to $3 million and the cost to construct a new structure would be between $18 million and $33 million. Both scenarios are obviously very costly and will also take a lengthy amount of time to renovate or replace.
This is absolutely the time for the city to re-evaluate the Picture Main Street (PMS) project. The city’s “answer” to the loss of a third of the parking spaces on Main Street as part of PMS was that people could just park in the garage and walk to Main Street. (Putting aside for the moment that not everyone is physically capable of walking from the garage to Main Street). That obviously now is a major problem for the city.
Moreover, when one considers the parking shortage on King Street, the city simply cannot afford the logistics of losing a third of the Main Street parking spaces in order to accommodate bike lanes on 700 yards of Main Street. Especially when there is already an existing bike path that runs parallel to Main Street.
There have to be priorities and right now, having a safe, functional city parking garage has to be more important than PMS.
Effective city governments reevaluate plans/projects when new information comes up. We now have a looming parking crisis with the parking garage. We also have the ever-increasing costs of PMS to factor in. It is time to, at the very least, put PMS on the back burner and not go forward with this project and instead put our resources towards having a safe, operational parking garage.
Christina Ryan
Northampton