Developers of the proposed new building north of the McMenamins Elks Temple in downtown Tacoma will ask the City Council today for a new agreement so they can start construction this summer.
“The design is the same. It’s not one iota different,” developer Grace Pleasants said Monday, describing the $32 million project she and business partner Rick Moses have been working on since 2009: a mixed-use retail and housing complex atop a parking garage owned and operated by the city.
Building that $10 million parking garage is one of the key questions coming before the council at today’s noon study session: Should the City of Tacoma, whose parking enterprise fund faces falling into debt in two years, build another parking garage downtown?
“We want to make sure we’re not going to have to subsidize this parking garage,” Mayor Marilyn Strickland said Monday. “I understand the commitment from us is the equity, and I know that relationship, but we really need to make sure that we’re not subsidizing this.”
Pleasants and Moses have been working for more than two years to nail down various forms of financing. Their original development agreement with the city required them to finance the project and buy the city-owned land by last fall. They missed that deadline.
Soon afterward, the city received the first-ever financial analysis of the city’s newly integrated parking system, which combines management and operations of five off-street municipal lots and garages with those of 150 newly introduced on-street parking pay stations.
That analysis concluded that the system, which is supposed to be self-sustaining, will fall into debt in 2013 and not climb out until 2025.
Councilman Jake Fey said Monday that he and other council members have asked the developers for a breakdown of the garage’s expected financials.
“McMenamins logically will be relying on the parking, too, so it includes expectations of what that business will do,” he said.
“I still consider it a project that’s all one … and it needs to be judged that way.”
On Monday, Pleasants said the only change to the building design is converting the one-time McMenamins-run hotel to apartments, raising the total number of market-rate units to 111 from 69.
Pleasants said she and Moses have abandoned the federal loan guarantees they had been seeking as part of the project’s financing. She said they’ve secured a private lender, who she would not name. But she said the lender “is ready to close on a loan” and is finishing a financial review.
“Part of that (review) is having an agreement with the city to complete their 262 stalls of parking,” Pleasants said.
Kathleen Cooper: 253-597-8546
kathleen.cooper@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/business
Twitter: @KCooperTNT
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