Agency may grow Boston Common garage
Boston Business Journal - by Michelle Hillman Boston Business Journal
The Massachusetts Convention Center Authority is eyeing the possibility of doubling the capacity of the Boston Common Garage, and awarded a contract to a local engineering firm to conduct a feasibility study.
The Boston Common garage is located under the Boston Common and across the street from the Boston Public Garden. It contains 1,367 underground parking spaces and could be expanded to include another 800 to 1,300 additional spaces, said James E. Rooney, executive director of the MCCA.
Last week MCCA awarded a $260,000 contract to Framingham-based engineering firm
Tetra Tech Rizzo Inc. to study whether expanding the Boston Common garage is feasible. Rooney said the study will help MCCA decide if the garage?s expansion makes sense. Rooney said only half of the garage was built in the first phase of construction.
Expanding the garage could be a complicated matter legally and logistically. If the MCCA decided to move ahead, it would have to exercise powers of eminent domain to clear the title on unused land, according to a legislative study commission on the Common garage and the
Hynes Convention Center from 2006. However, the report did not recommend an expansion without studying the need first.
?This is the very, very beginning of trying to answer many of these questions ... the constructability, the demand,? said Rooney.
The initial study will look at whether there are any serious roadblocks to expanding the garage and will take six months to complete. Rooney doesn?t know when a decision will be made.
The garage operates at 90 percent capacity and generates about $11 million in gross annual revenue, he said. At the time of the 2006 study, the garage?s net cash flow of $5 million was used to offset deficit spending in other MCCA activities. The commission found that gross revenue from the garage had steadily increased from close to $3 million in 1996 to more than $9 million in 2006. In January, the MCCA announced it was raising daily and monthly parking rates at the garage for the first time in three years.
As of March, daily rates had increased by as much as $2, depending on length of stay; weekend rates increased by $1 to $11; and monthly rates increased between $10 to $20, depending on the times of day covered.
State Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, who co-chaired the study commission, said the MCCA will need to determine who uses the garage and whether there is actually a need for more parking in downtown Boston.
?I think that the one thing that is clear (is) there is a dedicated and loyal customer base,? said Wilkerson. ?Parking is difficult but I don?t know that the answer to that is, ?We need to create more parking.? ?
The MCCA has a permit that enables it to operate 1,500 spaces at the Boston Common garage. If the MCCA decides to expand the garage, it will have to apply for a new permit, said Carl Spector, executive director of Air Pollution Control for the city of Boston.
However, a decades-old parking freeze limits the number of commercial spaces that can be added at any one time.
The freeze capped the number of commercial spaces in Boston at 35,556, Spector said.
The number of unused spaces is monitored in a parking bank. There are currently 817 unused spaces in the parking bank for downtown Boston, meaning the maximum number of spaces the MCCA could add would be 817, unless spaces were added to the bank.
Parking spaces are often added, for example, when garages are torn down. Neither residential nor office-worker spaces apply, said Spector.
Seth Kaplan, vice president for climate advocacy at the Conservation Law Foundation, criticized the proposal.
?It was a bad idea when it was floated about a year ago and it?s an even worse idea now considering where gas prices are,? Kaplan said.
Instead Kaplan suggests improving the public mass transit system ? for both economic and environmental reasons.
