With no private interest in parking garage, council must decide how to build plan into budget

LACONIA — After a three-month period calling for expressions of interest on the future of the downtown parking garage, the city has received no responses.

Discussions about what to do with the garage have been bouncing around city government for years. Meanwhile, the cost to maintain and restore the structure have grown. A private option was a hoped-for relief for city leadership grappling with both their desire to fix an eyesore at the entrance to a revitalized Main Street and their discomfort to yoke taxpayers onto a now eight-figure project.

“This was disappointing, but not really surprising,” Mayor Andrew Hosmer said in an interview Tuesday. “I understand why people might be reluctant” to take on the project.

Two events last fall led the council to pump the brakes on its own rehabilitation efforts and to consider private offers. An update last fall that showed the cost of rehabilitating the structure — the route the city had selected previously — had spiked to between approximately $8 million and $12 million. Also, a parking study found the garage is likely unnecessary to maintain adequate parking supply downtown.

The call for expressions of interest began in January and ended in mid-March — with no takers.

The city owns the second and third levels of the 50-year-old structure — largely unused due to structural and safety concerns — while the land and commercial space under the parking garage are privately owned. This, and the extensive structural repairs needed, pose a financial and creative challenge to any party examining the structure’s potential and were likely, according to Hosmer, a main deterrent for private parties.

“I heard that the reason people were not particularly interested, were reluctant to make expressions of interest” was the complex ownership arrangement, Hosmer said.

The potential for private offers, Hosmer said in January, was a way for the city to keep its options open, allowing a potential savings to the city of millions of dollars in construction costs while not fully abandoning the planning progress it had made toward a city-led rehabilitation.

Now, as the council writes its budget for the upcoming year, it faces a choice: either take no action on the garage, therein having no need to set aside funds; or definitively decide between rehabilitating the garage and dismantling it, both costly actions to factor into next year’s budget. Not only will the city have to make a choice about whether to take action on the garage, it will also have to firmly commit that decision.

Hosmer said he and the council are still apprehensive about the high cost and low need for restoration. Demolition, while less expensive, also mounts complicated financial hurdles. Though the city is keeping its options open, he said, he’d frown upon taking no action.

The building, he said — noting that he looked down on it from his city hall office during the interview — is “universally viewed as ugly and unnecessary” and “dangerous.” Yet $10 million diverted to restore such a building, he continued, is $10 million the city can’t spend on roads, schools and parks. The construction of a structure with low aesthetic benefit at the entrance to downtown he said, was “a mistake made 50 years ago” that later generations are now tasked with correcting.

Deconstruction “has got to be an option,” he said, but the council will take into account as many alternatives as arise.

The appearance of a private interest with both the means and creative vision to transform the garage despite its complicated circumstances would have been a way out of this dilemma. 

“We may have been hoping for a miracle that never arrives,” Hosmer said. 

The council discussed the matter at its meeting Monday night.