Maybe we need to rethink city hall, parking

In the early days of the city hall study, which I was involved with as a city councilor, we hoped for a new city hall and expanded parking for downtown shoppers and diners — for a reasonable price. Our expectation of cost in those early days was nothing compared to what I now understand we are looking at.  

For example, we considered the Mountain West Bank site where for $2 million we could have had a nice facility, including furniture. That choice would have allowed us to utilize a significant portion of the current city hall location for surface parking, adding more than 50 parking spaces for use by downtown shoppers and diners.  

Now, costs have almost tripled and we will only get the parking we anticipated by building a multi-story parking garage that blocks views of Big Mountain and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to operate each year.  

When you really want something, it’s hard to say maybe we need to rethink this. But, maybe we need to rethink this.

The paved parking lot we installed at Second and Spokane added about 85 parking spaces and cost about $500,000. That is about $5,900 per parking space. If city hall were moved only a few blocks, we could expand the existing site for parking for shoppers and diners and pick up the spaces currently being used by city hall employees. We’d also retain the ability to place one of the most valuable corners in town back on the tax rolls when demand returns.

The current proposal rebuilds city hall in its current location and adds a 196-space parking garage. It will cost more than $9 million of which will come from TIF taxes imposed on Whitefish property owners. The garage alone will cost an estimated $6 million to build, more than $150,000 to $300,000 per year to operate, and will block our gateway views of Big Mountain. Is that really what Whitefish residents want?

We have numerous other needs — jobs, economic development, schools, families struggling financially — projects like this detract significantly from our ability to invest in these other areas.

Perhaps one possible solution would be for the downtown businesses to share the burden of a project of this scope with the taxpayers through an SID assessment. While everyone agrees that our downtown is important, it’s hard to understand why those business owners should get the vast majority of our tax dollars while other Whitefish businesses and locations struggle. Restaurant and shop owners located outside of downtown are responsible for their own parking and maintenance; it’s hard to understand why downtown businesses don’t have the same obligations.  

Now, with $11 million plus $300,000 per year in operating expenses being considered for downtown parking and government space, we might want to revisit not only the wisdom, but the fairness of it all.

— Turner Askew