HomeMy WebLinkAboutcc - Meyer (Palm Nipomo Parking Garage) 3/2/2018
From:Eric Meyer <frenchbicycles@gmail.com>
Sent:Friday, March
To:E-mail Council Website
Cc:Advisory Bodies; Grigsby, Daryl; Codron, Michael; Johnson, Derek
Subject:Palm nipomo garage alternative
Council and planning commission
The Reis mortuary property across the street from the Palm Nipomo garage is approx 185x350 and would create a
surface parking lot of approx 200 parking spaces on the ground without building anything... just demo and paving.
Simultaneously, simply leveling and paving the area currently occupied by the existing city owned houses on the site of
the proposed palm nipomo garage structure can add approx 50 spaces to the approx 75 there now... for a total of 125
on the ground there.
Together these two lots would create +/- 325 spaces on the ground. No structure needed.
The new 445 space palm nipomo structure proposed eliminates the potential 125 existing ground spaces there now.
Thus the structure has an actual net gain of only 320 spaces. The 23 million dollars garage building costs divided by 320
equals 71,000 per space.
So 200 spaces on the ground should be worth 71,000 x 200 or +/- 14,000,000 million. (Perhaps minus demo, landscape
and paving costs)
Spending 14 million on additional land acquisition seems financially more prudent than building a garage which may or
may not be able to support its own debt service in the future. We truly don’t know the future. Do we really want to risk
this?
It would seem to me that making a $14,000,000 offer on the reis property using the parking reserves and a small bond
issuance might be a more prudent use of bond funding than the speculative building of the garage which, if projections
about autonomy are correct, will be obsolete in a number of decades.
If the autonomous car parking speculations are correct and parking goes vacant, you simply sell the former surface
parking lots at market in the future and you regain the entire investment to use on something else... or build workforce
housing there... or create some other public benefit there. If projections about autonomy are wrong and parking is still
needed in the future... we will still be able to build a structure.... and we will have twice as much area to do it in.
This concept or one similar poses dramatically less risk to the city’s general fund for repayment of bonds in the future
should parking revenue not meet your projections while simultaneously offering more opportunities for additional
parking, housing, etc if needed.
Spending 14 million rather than 23 million means that if there is parking revenue... it can be used for capital
improvement projects (or other) rather than paying off 9 million in additional debt.
All of this is, of course, predicated on whether or not the Reis family is interested in selling at that price (or another). So
the big question is: have you made an offer?
Thanks for your consideration... and for all you do!
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Eric Meyer
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