Last summer, after nine years of delays and false starts, it finally looked as if the City of Tacoma might be close to building parking garages to replace at least some of the Tacoma Dome parking lost to the LeMay-America’s Car Museum.
The city won the chance to sell $9.4 million worth of federal economic stimulus bonds to finance an income-producing project, and prefabricated garages at the Dome seemed to fit the bill.
Then-City Manager Eric Anderson and a company with experience building modular parking structures in Italy came up with a plan to put up two moveable parking structures, one between the Dome and the Best Western Tacoma Dome Hotel, and the other on the large, triangular parking lot east of the Dome.
The garages could be assembled like Lego projects and, if necessary, dismantled and moved to other locations.
The plan quickly changed from two garages to one, then fizzled altogether after engineers and financial analysts came to the conclusion that the structures would never pay for themselves.
“It just didn’t pencil out,” said Rob Henson, the city’s acting public facilities director and Dome manager. “It would have been a huge drain to pay on the bond.”
Analyses done for proposed structures turned up some practical engineering problems as well.
Buried utilities presented expensive problems. Parking Lot A, just north of the car museum, was rejected in part because of height restrictions in the city’s gifting agreement with LeMay.
The car museum successfully negotiated for an unobstructed view across Parking Lot A to downtown Tacoma, which restricts any new parking structure to a single elevated “tray” of parking.
Moving the structure to the relatively remote eastern side of the Dome, just north of Interstate 5, would have put it so far from the rest of the Dome business district that it seemed unlikely to be used for anything but Dome events. That meant it would stand empty most of the time.
The design of the modular structure also had structural problems. Modifying it to conform with local seismic codes would have raised the cost and reduced the number of cars it could accommodate.
The city tossed the plan, which left it scrambling for another permissible use for the bonds.
“Now we have $9.4 million for a project and no project,” City Councilman David Boe said recently.
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