At its June 21 meeting, Charlottesville City Council voted to pay $1.6 million for a 39-spot parking lot at 921 E. Jefferson St. to expand downtown parking capacity. While a new parking lot has been framed as a pressing need for years, some community members claim the decision to purchase the lot is based on false narratives, and is a waste valuable city funds.
“Excuse me, but where are your priorities,” Nancy Carpenter asked bluntly during public comment prior to the vote. She insisted there were more pressing matters Charlottesville should attend to, such as affordable housing.
Chris Engel, the city’s director of economic development, framed the purchase as a logical and cost-effective way to expand parking capacity downtown in general, and to meet an agreement between the city and county to provide more parking for the courts.
The alternative to the purchase would be allocating spaces for the courts in the Market Street Garage, Engel told councilors, pushing the occupancy in the garage well above 85 percent and “jeopardizing the business community.”
Providing parking for the courts has been an ongoing process. In 2018, the city entered an intergovernmental agreement with Albemarle County to provide parking for the courts complex downtown. After purchasing the county’s portion of a parking lot on Seventh Street and an adjoining parcel for an intended $11.3 million new parking garage, City Council voted to abandon that plan in June.
Claiming that the court’s deal with Albemarle County was “a bad agreement,” Councilor Michael Payne argued that providing 100 spaces for the courts in the garage “isn’t the end of the world,” although he acknowledged “the majority of council does not agree with that sentiment.” He pressed Engel on whether purchasing the Jefferson Street lot would guarantee that Lucky 7 and Guadalajara wouldn’t still be torn down in the future to build another parking garage.
“I don’t know if I’m in a position to give a guarantee on that,” Engel admitted. He stressed that the current purchase would help the parking situation in the short term.
Payne was the sole councilor to vote against the purchase. Councilor Brian Pinkston, who voted with the majority in favor of buying the lot, said he trusts city staff’s expertise in determining a reasonable occupancy rate in the Market Street garage.
“Everything having to do with parking downtown is always controversial,” Pinkston said with a slight chuckle.
Community member Matthew Gillikin—who regularly tweets about local politics to his 3.5K Twitter followers—doesn’t share Pinkston’s trust.
“I’ve said it a million times: We don’t have a parking supply problem downtown. We have a parking management problem,” he tells CVILLE. “And there’s plenty of evidence to back that up.”
The evidence Gillikin refers to is a 2015 study on downtown parking conducted by transportation planning firm Nelson\Nygaard. The study notes that parking utilization from 9am to 5pm on an average weekday is 67 percent. However, on peak court days the Market Street Garage “commonly reaches, and occasionally exceeds, its practical capacity.” Nelson\Nygaard recommended better managing the parking spaces the city already has rather than building new ones.
Gillikin has several suggestions for how the city could have better utilized the money now committed to the new parking lot.
“Even if we were to narrow it down to just ways to enhance downtown, you could put in seating, public bathrooms, more accessibility for people with disabilities,” he says.