The lack of easily accessible parking will probably kill the downtown renaissance

You might remember that when Mayor Funkhouser began his "glorious" reign he promised that the first TIF to come across his desk "darn well better come from the Eastside."

Well, it turns out he was talking about the East side of the downtown loop.

And that's probably okay because it turns out that people (like me & TKC's current favorite obnoxious commenter the paintman) who have been complaining that there is no parking downtown for all of these grand ponzi schemes have now been proved correct.

To wit, the The federal General Services Administration wants to build a 680,000-square-foot office building at 11th and Holmes streets as part of the East Village redevelopment plan bringing 1,600 jobs to Kansas City but there is only one not so simple problem:

There is no parking.

Obviously the way to fix this thing is clear, it's what KC has been doing for more than a decade now . . . The locals are going to have to pony up MILLIONS in tax breaks with the caveat that THIS TIME it's really going to help Kansas City's economy and not just line the pockets millionaires who will profit from development in areas that aren't really blighted.

While that may be true, it's also the same argument that former Mayor Kay Barnes used with each and every TIF she lovingly squeezed through (ew) and it's the EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT MAYOR FUNKHOUSER PROMISED.

Even worse, another hefty TIF for an already over-invested (read: speculated upon) area by Kansas City is probably mandatory given that Federal regulations ban the government form making that kind of investment in parking for themselves.

The GSA wants to include a 1,360-space underground garage in the office project. Officials also want to replace the hundreds of spaces now used by workers at the nearby Bolling Federal Building that would be lost to the planned East Village development.

To accomplish that goal, the GSA wants to build a 2,200-space garage on a block it owns at 12th and Holmes just east of the Bolling Building. That property is currently being used for surface parking.

At a price tag of $20,000 to $25,000 per space, the proposed underground garage could cost from $27.2 million to $34 million and the proposed new Bolling garage approximately $44 million to $55 million. The proposed office building would cost $170 million to $175 million.

Because federal policy prohibits its agencies from paying for parking construction, it’s up to the city to decide whether the tax-increment financing request for parking is beneficial.

An alternative to the Bolling garage being explored by the GSA calls for teaming up with Jackson County to build a garage on property the county owns across Oak Street from the new Sprint Center. That location, between 13th and 14th streets east of Oak, is currently used for surface parking.

County officials say they need at least 500 spaces and would be willing to consider a joint project with the GSA, however no serious discussions have taken place.

Now there are a few major issues that are tied to Kansas City's colossal parking problem and they actually seem to benefit a jerk like me (because they give me something to complain about) but don't bode so well for downtown cheerleaders:

Even if the County gets involved with their alternative scheme it's still not gonna solve Kansas City's downtown parking problems . . . More than 1,300 hundred new spaces or even 2000 more spaces aren't gonna be enough when a Midwestern crowd at a typical a ratio one person to one car want to venture downtown to a check out a hockey game that hosts 18,000 fans or maybe check out Electric Avenue and one of the many chain stores that are far more easily accessible in the suburbs.

Really, is a suburban housewife with kids in tow going to want to endure a scary downtown parking tower with a bevy of homeless lurking about in order to take her pack to eat the same mozzarella sticks she can get anywhere else?

And please don't come at me with that "16,000 people already live downtown!!!" crap because that's a fiction and the low turnout last election and the tumbleweeds downtown after 5 p.m. prove that it's not true.

Let's not forget that added downtown parking will be a boon to the homeless inside the loop considering that it will give them even more cars to break into (to grab $2.35 in loose change) so that should also be kind of funny and scare away visitors inside of 6 months.

MOST IMPORTANTLY: Private parking companies are poised to make profits hand over fist given the lack of parking downtown coupled with the well documented fact that they can be fascist pricks when it comes to enforcing penalties in and around their lots and just a few of the fines they charge of up to $500 bucks will quickly chase away anybody who wants to go downtown for leisure. Put simply, they don't boot your car at Oak Park Mall.

All these things add up to a bunch of crushing problems that somebody should have considered before they started construction on all of these schemes to feed the ego of Kay Barnes. And as I've written numerous times before, these problems weren't started by Mayor Funkhouser but they are his to deal with and they require him to break so many of of overenthusiastic and naive campaign promises even if it still won't help the doomed pipe dreams of so many of this town's ignorant construction cheerleaders.

All things considered, the fact that few people wanted to talk about the reality of where people will place their cars to come downtown has led to a crisis situation that ain't pretty and now that Kansas City is on the cusp of opening the doors to a couple of the risky plans this city is banking on . . . There is no doubt that the lack of parking is a serious problem and will most likely prove to the be the undoing of the well laid plans of the downtown renaissance.