Introducing: A Hotel With no Parking

A while back, I shared about some of the stupidities that our local government here in our small seaside city seems to engage in. As part of that I think I may have mentioned that a piece of land formerly dedicated to affordable housing now is instead being built out as a luxury hotel.

Granted, this town is definitely a tourist destination, but whether we need any more hotel rooms to accommodate the visitors is open to debate and then I won't get into it.

But somehow the plans and permits to put up a 70-80 room Boutique Hotel on a piece of land formerly occupied by a single story Professional Building got run through City Council, and got approval. And so, it is now under construction.

Perhaps the dumbest part of this particular plan is that the hotel is going to have no dedicated parking. Sure, it will have a drive-thru area with a few parking spaces a reception for the purposes of checking in but that's about the extent of it.

Depending on who you ask and what plans you look at there's going to be about 12 — maybe 16 — parking spaces for 70 to 80 rooms.

Having 12-16 parking spaces was fine when it was a professional building, because the building housed the offices of 8 counselors, attorneys, and other such professionals that's all limited traffic in a volume commensurate with having 12 spaces.

I'm not sure whose palms were crossed with silver in the planning committee or in the city council to get the go-ahead for this project, but the whole thing seems incredibly stupid.

It would be impossible to build an underground parking garage because the building is practically at sea level and the water table would cause constantly free flooding in any such structure.

If you ask anyone in city government about where the parking is supposed to happen they will tell you that there will be on-the-street parking. But there's already not enough on street parking to accommodate the existing load so how would there be enough on street parking to accommodate more?

Moreover the on-street parking is all 2 hours maximum and generally enforce pretty tightly by the local meter reader volunteers. I've personally had my tires chalked several times and thankfully have been out of there before they came back around to give me a citation.

Some folks believe that parking is going to happen in the shopping center across the street... which doesn't actually have any stores open past 6:00 so for the most part overnight guests would not be a problem. But what about people who come to stay more than one night?

From where I'm sitting, and as a former Merchant in the downtown area (which is where this is all taking place), all I can see is a horrible mess!

That mess is actually made worse by the fact that the hotel is located practically across the street from the ferry terminal, meaning that the on-street parking that is available is often used by ferry traffic for people who walk on the ferry for a day out on the other side of the water.

But there is a second part of this equation that nobody's talking about, or at least not talking about very much.

The professionals who had offices in the old building which provided services to local residents — many of whom live in the general downtown area — have all relocated to new facilities scattered all over the place, and almost all of them outside the city limits. Meaning, that for those who used to be able to walk from their downtown apartments to see their counselor or maybe their accountant, they now have a 20 minute drive each way to consider. In other words, as part of this project we have also lost a degree of local service quality.

Of course, the general Public's input to this whole process was somehow swept under the rug to a degree where it was too late. So all I can really say is we need to sit back and pop popcorn and see what happens!

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