The Municipal Parking Garage in downtown Derby has aging issues.
Mr. Foley can think of only two ways to handle these issues: either privatize the garage or knock it down.
Derby’s bi-partisan Parking Authority has sent out feelers to the owners and operators of parking garages in municipalities near and far in the hope of finding a buyer.
This has been an ongoing theme of the Parking Authority, but nobody is willing to purchase the garage. If anyone knows of a buyer, please do Derby a favor and let us know who
this entity is.
One needs to solve three major problems if they want to demolish the garage.
They need to find money to demolish the garage. It is not a cheap proposition to haul away the many tons of rubble let alone the actual cost of demolition. Additional site
improvements need to be made to use the land as a parking lot, a future new garage, or for some other use.
In demolishing the garage, one will also have to find a space large enough to handle the 10,000 cars that currently park in the garage every month. The logical place to put
these cars would be in a new garage built on the site of the old one.
However, a new garage today will cost many millions of dollars that we don’t have. Federal and State grants for parking garages are rare.
Finally, unless these spaces are found, one will generate legal fees in trying to explain why Derby is breaking its legal contract with the Senior Center, the State of Connecticut, and others and I believe our opponents have stated that they want to avoid unnecessary lawsuits.
There are at least two other options for dealing with the garage.
We can continue operating as we are. This method necessitates the application of frequent “band aids” and these are temporary fixes that need to be repeated often and
get more expensive as the garage gets older.
The Parking Authority generates enough revenue to operate this way for now.
The ideal solution would be a total renovation of the garage. This would cost at least $1.5 million dollars, considerably less than a new garage.
The writer is a Republican running for the Board of Aldermen. He is a member of the Derby Parking Authority.
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