Airport plans to build 2021 Modern Parking Ramp for half the cost of the DTSF ramp
l3wis 
This was from a March 24, 2017 presentation Dan Letellier did at Democratic Forum (FF: 26:00 in the below video).
Notice they are getting 1,100 parking stalls for about $20-22,000 per stall. The Downtown parking ramp is proposing 525 stalls (over a 100 will be leased privately and not for public use) for $40,500 per stall.
Now if the DT ramp’s cost was even just a little bit more, I wouldn’t balk, but the proposed DT ramp is TWICE as much per stall than the airport.
As I have said, industry standard for building parking ramps is about $25,000 per stall. When this high cost for the stalls was brought up to the Community Development manager Daren Ketchum yesterday, he blew it off and said that he wasn’t concerned about the ‘stall’ cost. WHAT!?
It is pretty common in the parking ramp construction business to price parking ramps per stall. That’s just how it is done. Secondly the airport ramp is a very fair comparison because both ramps are being built on land that is already owned by the builder and the airport authority will be paying down the bonds using user fees. It is apples to apples.
Where this deal gets even more curious is that the developer of the hotel will be paying a one-time 80 year lease to the city of $1 million. This comes to about $1,042 per month for a 120 room, 13 story hotel. You can’t get a decent downtown loft for $1,000 a month.
So why so much? Well let’s start with the obvious. This is a taxpayer subsidized welfare to a developer, and mind you, a developer who was involved with the Copper Lounge collapse, which OSHA is still pending their investigation.
So why an extra $10 million to build this parking ramp compared to the airport ramp? Besides the obvious welfare, I speculate, it is because the ramp is on the bottom of the structure and will have to be extra reinforced to support the PRIVATE hotel construction. In other words we are subsidizing the hotel construction by $10 million.
I support downtown growth and a parking ramp. I do NOT support getting hosed by a private developer. The city needs to build this ramp for $10 million or build a ramp twice the size at a different location.
