Dear Action Line: I have looked all over for this garage. Can you help? – E. Lee Gullparker
Dear E. Lee: OK, after spending all weekend driving around Durango, Action Line is stumped too and has given up. It wasn’t at Sixth Street and East Second Avenue; heck, Sixth Street seems to have vanished entirely. Nor was it along Seventh Street west of the train tracks.
Does anyone know? Where is it?
Oh, wait. This Herald story (see accompanying photo) was from 1985. This question was asked facetiously. Sorry, Action Line is always a little slow on the take.
Yup, 37 years later and there is still no parking garage. City task force member R. Michael Bell’s nifty drawing is filed away somewhere. Bell has since retired from his architecture firm and is also filed away somewhere. The concrete to be used for the garage instead helped to build dams in China. The vehicles in the sketch have guzzled their last gas.
The story, by the award-winning Barry Smith, says the cost for the 360-space garage would be $3.6 million. That’s $10,000 per space. Just for fun, Action Line contacted Smith to see if he recalled such a garage being considered an inevitability at the time.
“Sounds pretty cheap today, huh?” said Smith, who resides again in the Four Corners after a stellar newspaper career that took him to Nevada. “I have vague recollections of this plan, but nothing seemed inevitable when it came to downtown.”
Long-range vision is a tricky thing. We’re still not sure a parking garage is necessary, but we can all agree there’s a housing crunch. Ironically, Smith noted, Whispering Pines (now Hermosa Hill condos) was built around the same time – mid-1980s – to solve a chronic housing shortage. Well, maybe that didn’t quite do the trick.
City spokesman Tom Sluis said a city consultant recently recommended against building a parking garage, in part because spaces already exist. And the cost was about $35,000 to $40,000 per space. The 1985 parking garage plan called for contributions from local businesses – a public/private venture. Why does that seem even less likely nowadays?
Should we compare ourselves to Telluride, where there’s both a downtown parking garage and a free parking area about 10 minutes’ walk from downtown? Durango has neither, but does offer Transit Center parking for $30 for a month.
Wade Moore, the city of Durango’s parking operations manager, said that 37 years later, recent studies show that “people’s travel habits, town and visitor growth have still not justified that expense. If and when a parking garage is justified by data, it is going to be very expensive to build, which ultimately gets passed on to the citizens of Durango.”
Coincidentally, the city is about to unveil the final draft of its Comprehensive Parking Management Plan. City Council will hear this plan Tuesday afternoon during a study session in council chambers – the supply and demand, the finances, the “data-driven solutions” to guide the next 20 years. Walker Consultants will make the presentation.
“The consultant’s initial indication at City Council on Oct. 18 was that the data does not point to a parking structure at this time,” Moore said. “What we expect in that plan will be the trigger points that would justify a structure when the time is right.”
So, to bring this full circle:
A few months after the February 1985 story, the Herald editorial board wrote about summertime parking pressure downtown. It noted, “The silence was deafening when the city made public its broad-brush proposal for the location and financing of a downtown parking garage. ... The signals from all directions were clear: No parking garage.” There was consensus that chalking tires – in order to see which cars had overstayed their allotted time – was the way to go.
Durango doesn’t chalk tires anymore, right? (Hopefully not, because the U.S. Sixth Circuit last year ruled it to be an unconstitutional search.)
Those hoping for a parking garage in the next decade are almost certainly going to be disappointed unless they fund and build it themselves. Action Line will return with an update in (let’s see, 37 + 2022 = ...) the year 2059. There may be a different Action Line by then, but stay tuned!
Email questions and suggestions to actionline@durangoherald.com or mail them to Action Line, The Durango Herald, 1275 Main Ave., Durango, CO 81301. Inside tip: After the parking plan, stick around at Tuesday’s study session for a show on “Development of Pickleball Courts at Schneider Park.” That’ll be good too.
