ticket for a parking violation.
In a setback for development of Providence’s old downtown, the General Assembly has scuttled – at least for a year – a major new parking garage that experts believe is the quickest way to ease the area’s chronic parking shortage.
The proposed garage, to be constructed on the surface parking lot behind the Garrahy Courthouse, has been talked about going back to 1982, and this year seemed likely to go forward because Governor Almond included it in his budget.
But the General Assembly, by the time it had adjourned June 4, had failed to approve a form of financing known as "certificates of participation," which would have allowed construction of the estimated $13 to $15 million structure.
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Proposed is a four- to five-story garage that would park at least 900 cars and perhaps as many as 1,100.
"It’s a disappointment, it really is," said Peter Armato, president of The Downcity Partnership, which promotes development in the old downtown area of retail and office buildings that is struggling to be reborn as a center for entertainment, the arts and higher education, and as a rejuvenated neighborhood for urban-oriented residents.
Armato, as did many other backers of the project, said that the idea of the Garrahy garage is so practical that he hopes that the proposal is still viable and that the legislature will take a more favorable view when it convenes next January.
Daniel A. Baudouin, executive director of The Providence Foundation, an affiliate of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, said he thinks the crush of budget issues facing the state did not allow legislators to focus on the Garrahy project sufficiently this year.
Many experts believe that more parking is needed in the downtown area for the area to grow. And further, the Garrahy project is seen by downtown advocates as the most feasible and affordable.
Kenneth Orenstein, a former Providence Foundation director, who now is a consultant to real estate developers and who is part of the group proposing the Garrahy garage, said the project has many plusses.
The state already owns the land for the garage, removing a major cost, Orenstein said. And further, the state already pays for parking for hundreds of state workers in the area, meaning those funds could simply be shifted to the garage as a key part of the financing.
Lack of parking always has haunted downtown, and even with thousands of new spaces recently provided by major garages attached to the Providence Convention Center and Providence Place shopping mall, the shortage remains critical.
Promoters of a rejuvenated "Downcity" believe there is at least a two-step approach to getting people into the restaurants and other business they hope will populate the area’s many vacant storefronts.
One is to increase the parking supply, so that customers can make quick visits, and that downtown workers will have a place to park all day. The other is to decrease the demand for parking by more use of mass transit.
Increasingly, driver-only cars are heading for downtown. A Providence Foundation survey of 3,000 downtown workers several years ago found that 78 percent now drive by themselves to work, up from 61 percent in 1987.
In 1999, the city, the state, the Providence Foundation, the chamber and a downtown coalition collaborated in a detailed study that argued three new parking garages would be economically feasible:
One would be on the existing parking lot behind the Garrahy courthouse, bounded by Friendship, Richmond and Clifford streets.
A second garage would be on land that now includes the Traveler’s Aid center for homeless persons, (which is scheduled to move), bounded by Union, Westminster, Clemence and Weybosset streets, with 450 spaces and costing at least $8.5 million.
A third was discussed for Snow, Washington, Aborn and Westminster streets, with about 650 spaces. The cost was not estimated.
But the Garrahy garage has seemed the best bet, because of the state’s involvement: both in owning the land and in already paying for courthouse employees and workers of other state agencies to park in lots around the city.
"We were all looking forward to that," said Samuel J. Shamoon, director of the city’s Department of Planning and Development. "Hopefully, it’s not dead."
With the Traveler’s Aid move still many months away, that leaves only two current parking increases actively in the works. One proposal would double the size of two surface lots by building one-story decks. The first site is on Mathewson Street near Washington; the other on Snow Street, near the Providence facility of Roger Williams College.
Joseph A. Paolino Jr., former mayor and state economic development director whose family owns the lots, said the reason he’s not putting in taller structures is that the lots are so small that to build higher would require too much space for ramps, stairs and elevators.
The decks will add 80 cars on Mathewson Street and 60 spaces on Snow, he said.
But Paolino said parking is vital to the city, so much so that he thinks that some buildings must be demolished to create more parking if vacant buildings become filled with going concerns, such as college and hospital facilities.
"Sometimes, you have got to knock a building down if you want to save one," Paolino said, who added that at the same time he respects and is committed to the preservation of historic buildings downtown.
