The backstory: The parking garage for the Fort Wayne, Indiana, City-County Building was built on the site of the existing surface parking lot for the building with a basement-level garage beneath it. That’s the good part.

 

To provide temporary parking for employees during construction, the county acquired the oldest remaining residential structure downtown, one of three structures that predated the Civil War, and razed it and its carriage house. That’s the other part.

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City-County garage not filling spaces

 

By Dan Stockman

www.JournalGazette.com

 

The parking garage co-owned by Allen County and the city of Fort Wayne has seen business decline so much that the two governments will likely have to cover the bond payments this year, officials said Friday. The Plaza Parking Garage attached to the City-County Building, 1 E Main St., was at capacity in 2002 and 2003, officials said. But that was before the new Juvenile Justice Center opened on Wells Street, moving juvenile courtrooms from downtown and taking parking customers with it and before the Charles “Bud” Meeks Justice Center opened north of the garage and took more customers away. The justice center is just a half-block away, but people are parking on the street instead of in the garage.

 

“They’d rather pay a $5 ticket than park in the parking garage and walk a block and a half,” County Commissioner Marla Irving said.

 

 

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Keep in mind that as a municipal facility, the garage doesn't pay property taxes even though it occupies valuable real estate in a commercial area. The foregone property-tax revenue should be added to the shortfall to determine the subsidy that county taxpayers are paying for parking for people who won't even use it.

 

 

Wow...that really blows...you have any pictures of the houses that were razed?

Wow...that really blows...you have any pictures of the houses that were razed?

 

I'm not sure. If I do, they go back quite a ways. Perhaps one of these days they'll surface in the archive. I have photos of downtown going back into the sixties, and maybe a few before that; one of these days, when I have time for lots of scanning, I'll put up a page of that stuff.

“We offer some of the best rates in the downtown area,” Rousseau said, “But people don’t want to walk two blocks.”

 

That is pathetic...are people really that lazy?

 

In an effort to trim costs, the garage has been trying to switch from human cashiers to an ATM-like machine that takes payments, but the transition is not going well, said NAI Harding Dahm manages the garage.

 

“(Customers) don’t like machines, and they don’t want to put someone out of work,” Harding Dahm’s Pat Hayes said. “They’re just fighting us on it.”

 

I do have to say that I hate automated parking attendants.  They have failed at several locations.  Many of them do not seem to work properly and are sometimes hard to understand.  As a result, a long line of cars will form.  I've also seen situations where garage management has to work long hours in order to constantly fix the machines.

“We offer some of the best rates in the downtown area,” Rousseau said, “But people don’t want to walk two blocks.”

 

That is pathetic...are people really that lazy?

 

 

'Tis true. When I worked for Lincoln Financial, the company provided vast parking lots about a block from the office buildings. The on-street parking was always full all day with cars belonging to the earliest arrivals, who didn't want to walk a block to free parking. Instead, they'd park on the streets next to the buildings and go outside every two hours, all day long, to feed two quarters at a time to the meters. Two bucks a day, ten a week, five hundred a year to avoid walking a block to a free lot. That's typical all over town.

 

And there are the ones who go out at lunchtime and patrol the lot to see if any spots have opened up closer to the buildings, and move their cars. To some degree, it's more about status associated with having the best parking spot.

 

A lazy-ass intern in my office always parked his beat-up old IROC Camaro on the street, and habitually forgot to feed the meter. One morning at 3 a.m. the cops rousted him out of bed on a warrant for $600 in unpaid tickets, and his dad had to come down and pay the fine to get him out of the lockup. Next day he told about it at work as if he expected support and sympathy, and I laughed my ass off. He didn't like me after that.

 

Metered on-street parking is 25 cents per hour, and overtime parking tickets are $5. That's way too cheap, and I think the city intends to double the meter rates and fines to get the all-day parkers into the lots and garages and free up the metered spaces for people who come downtown for short times to transact business.