How much money is the City of Alameda putting into its parking garage?

It's a question that can be asked about many Bay Area suburbs and the parking garages they subsidize for their business districts. To take one extreme example, Palo Alto recently borrowed $42 million and drew an additional $8 million from its capital budget to build a single parking garage for the driving public in the California Ave business district.

In comparison, the costs of Alameda's Civic Center Parking Garage have been more modest — but still a meaningful percentage of the city's overall capital outlays:

• The garage was built at a cost of $9.2 million in 2007.
• For that, the City of Alameda Community Improvement Commission borrowed $8 million with a guarantee from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. (Those funds were also used for the simultaneous renovation of the Alameda Theatre.)

• In ~2019, the City of Alameda refinanced the Successor Agency's HUD Section 108 loan by issuing ~$5 million in bonds. As of June 2024, $2.4 million remained outstanding.
• For the 2023 - 2024 fiscal year, the City put $1 million dollars from the General Fund toward improving the parking garage:

Other parking plans are waiting on the garage

Systematic changes to parking in downtown Alameda have been waiting on these improvements to the Civic Center Parking Garage to be completed.

Ever wonder why you can so rarely find an open spot in the City's surface lot between Central Ave and Alameda Ave? It's, in part, because local businesses are allowed to buy monthly parking permits that enable their employees to park all day in that lot. It would be more effective overall for those all-day parkers to use the Civic Center Parking Garage instead, freeing up the more quickly accessed surface spots for shoppers who are probably coming for briefer visits and are willing to pay a higher hourly price.

However, last I heard, the city and business district didn't feel comfortable requiring monthly-pass holders to use the garage until it is improved with night-time security features. So the surface lot continues to be full of cars that sit all day, while shoppers circle for parking on the backside of Alameda Ave and Oak St (and Doordash drivers don't even look for a parking spot and ditch their vehicles directly on Park St).

As the city implements demand-responsive pricing for on-street parking on and near Park St, the Civic Center Parking Garage is supposed to serve as an alternative for parkers who want to stay for longer, at a lower cost.

The Civic Center Parking Garage is also playing a part in enabling new businesses to be built without on-site parking. The new taproom and restaurant at Park St. and San Jose Ave. has a comfortable outdoor patio for dogs and kids and their parents, rather than on-site car storage — in part, because they will give customers who want to arrive by car a coupon to offset the cost of parking down the street in the Civic Center Parking Garage.

A procurement puzzle

But where are the $1mm in improvements budgeted for two fiscal years ago?

An item under the consent calendar for the upcoming City Council meeting on September 2 answers some question — and raises more:

So in the intervening time, the project expanded from $1mm to $1.5mm?

Construction costs have risen extremely quickly over the last five years in California, so maybe city staff have just been caught off guard in their estimates?

Then again, the item's staff report mentions that there was only one responsive bid. Maybe the city is getting a bum deal?

Going back to the original procurement shows that city staff actually estimated the cost of construction as $650k.

But the procurement details add another wrinkle: the City issued a notice of intent to award the contract to the low bidder back in June. But that's not the firm that is listed as winning the award in the current City Council agenda packet. Instead, the low bidder is described in the packet as submitting a non-responsive bid. Now, the higher bid is evaluated as the only responsive bid — and is set to receive the award.

The higher bidder was perhaps miffed by being passed up and they successfully protested the bid. Their win is the city's — and taxpayer's — loss in terms of paying more for potentially the same services. What City Council is being asked to approve on the consent calendar appears to be over the original budget and behind the original schedule.

To be clear: This blogger is not an expert at public-sector capital budgeting, procurement, or project management. The approximate dollar amounts I provided above aren't separating out details like the base bid amount, bid alternates, and contingencies — meaning comparing the $650,000 estimate with the $1,568,000 not-to-exceed award total may not be comparing apples to apples. And there are likely more complexities to this process that require professional experience to understand.

This is a comparatively small project as public parking projects go. These costs are significantly less than Palo Alto's $50mm garage, or the massive new public garages that San Mateo and Burlingame both masked by bundling their construction in with neighboring subsidized affordable housing projects. (The median cost to build new structured parking in the United States is $29,900 for each spot.)

More funding needed to keep up with public infrastructure needs

Still, this comparatively small project to spruce up this parking garage is illustrative of the challenges the Alameda faces. In the ideal world, City of Alameda would have multiple responsive bids on all capital construction projects. I've also been surprised at how few bids the city has received on some street construction projects. First there was COVID-era material price increases and inflation-induced labor price increases. This year probably every major construction firm serving the public sector in California has shifted staff and resources down to LA to bid on larger projects rebuilding from the wildfires and preparing for the summer Olympics. Plus, there's the reality that the Miller/Trump administration is cruelly trying to deport many hard-working members of the American construction workforce. Many factors are leading to increasing construction costs. As a result, the City of Alameda needs to seek additional sources of funding through regional funding sources, state grants, and local taxes to be able to pay for the street and infrastructure repairs and improvements that we all need — and unfortunately not just to afford at the initially estimated amounts, but to also be able to pay at whatever is the effective market rate set by bidders.

It's probably still worth proceeding with this contract to improve the Civic Center Parking Garage, in order to keep the city's entire parking program for downtown Alameda moving forward. Regardless, it's always worth keeping in mind that in cities, parking is never free. The costs of building and operating and maintaining parking can be surprising — so let's not build any more than we can justify.