Whitefish residents will have their final say on a proposed downtown parking structure and City Hall complex tonight before the City Council decides how to proceed.

A public hearing will focus on whether to build a new City Hall at the current City Hall site and combine it with a three-story parking garage or build a new City Hall with a surface parking lot.

Consultants studied the feasibility of parking structures at four locations in the downtown area. 

The council decided some time ago, though, to keep City Hall at its current location. Combining a parking structure with a new City Hall would cost about $11.5 million and would use more than $9 million in tax-increment finance district revenue if that were the only funding source.

City Manager Chuck Stearns drew up a list of pros and cons for both City Hall/parking options, and the list of benefits for a combined City Hall and parking structure outweigh the negatives.

Stearns has recommended the city proceed with designing a new City Hall with a parking structure. He’s urging the council to make a decision tonight. If the council wants to delay its vote, Stearns said he feels the decision needs to be made yet this year.

A new City Hall has been on the drawing board in Whitefish for several years. At one time the preferred location was east of Depot Park.

A parking structure attached to City Hall could spur downtown development and is close to the O’Shaughnessy Center and Depot Park, Stearns’ analysis notes. On the other hand, annual maintenance would cost between $100,000 to $150,000 a year, he estimated. And some people would perceive the mass and scale of a parking structure to be too imposing, though it would add up to 193 spaces for parking close to Central Avenue.

There’s a current parking deficit of more than 200 spaces in downtown Whitefish, and that could grow to more than 700 needed spaces if development associated with the downtown master plan is realized, an earlier consultant study showed.

Building a City Hall with a surface lot would add only about 20 parking spaces and would do little to alleviate the growing parking problem in the downtown corridor. But a surface lot would allow for more design creativity and probably an improved aesthetic for a new City Hall, Stearns said.

If the council were to choose a City Hall and surface lot combination, there would still be opportunities to build a parking structure at the city lot on the northwest corner of Second Street and Spokane — a site considered for a parking garage with a retail component several years ago — or at a BNSF Railway Co. site near the viaduct and north of the O’Shaughnessy Center.

IT'S UNCLEAR whether there’s a council or community consensus one way or the other for the City Hall/parking complex. A guest editorial by City Council member Phil Mitchell in last week’s Whitefish Pilot supports a public vote on the project if the council can’t get unanimous support tonight for either option.

“This is a sufficient change to our community that I believe the vote belongs with Whitefish residents, not with the City Council,” Mitchell wrote.

He pointed out the City Hall site is located at one of Whitefish’s busiest intersection, and putting an imposing parking structure there would worsen the traffic problem. Mitchell further suggested a Special Improvement District for downtown and railway district property owners that would put the cost of a parking structure on those who benefit from it.

The parking structure proposal has drawn public input from both sides.

Bonnie Leahy recently wrote a letter to the council, saying the council has “been listening to a small group of people, all of whom stand to gain from any improvements to downtown, all of whom have a vested interest in the downtown.

“City funds appear to have become Santa’s grab bag for the Heart of Whitefish, while the rest of us apparently get coal,” Leahy wrote.

She said building a new City Hall downtown is the wrong choice because it takes up valuable real estate that should be used for retail businesses.

Ian Collins, chairman of the Heart of Whitefish nonprofit group that supports downtown Whitefish, also wrote to the council, saying he believes the risk the city faces in investing in structured parking “is more perceived risk than actual risk.

“If the city does not make this investment, will development on our potential infill sites even happen? I do not think so,” Collins said.

Collins worked with the planning department and property owners to determine that 40,500 square feet of new development worth more than $8 million have been added to the downtown area over the past couple of years. That development, however, added only about 10 to 12 parking spaces.

He suggested the city has missed an opportunity to get money for parking by requiring downtown parking in-lieu fees for new development. Information recently supplied to the Whitefish council showed in-lieu fees as high as $31,000 per parking space in Ketchum, Idaho, to $10,000 per space in Sandpoint, Idaho.

If Whitefish had a comparable fee structure in place the city would have generated as much as $2.7 million that could have offset the cost of a parking structure.

The public hearing is scheduled as part of the City Council’s regular meeting tonight that begins at 7:10 p.m. at City Hall.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.