Parking garage expansion urged Bangor panel: 2 more levels needed

BANGOR – Anyone who’s circled the city’s downtown looking for an open parking space on a weekday morning knows it can be a waiting game.

City officials here know it too, and are looking to make the downtown a bit more motorist-friendly, recently voting to borrow up to $3 million to add two new levels to the packed Pickering Square parking garage.

“We’re basically at or very near capacity right now,” said City Councilor Dan Tremble, who chaired a special committee on the city’s downtown parking situation. “Depending what happens with the [Maine Discovery Museum] and more housing in the downtown, it could get even tighter.”

Indeed, the increase in traffic anticipated with next month’s opening of the children’s museum was among the factors considered by the committee before recommending the new construction, Tremble said.

The new levels, the price for which is still being negotiated with the firm that designed the structure about 10 years ago, will add 156 spaces to the 500-space, five-story garage on the edge of the city’s downtown.

The final price tag must then be approved by the city’s finance committee as well as the full City Council. City finance officials on Thursday said initial estimates put the cost at about $2.5 million.

If all goes according to plan, construction could begin as early as this spring, city officials said.

It remains unclear how big of an impact the children’s museum will have on the already strained downtown parking, according to Sean Faircloth, the museum’s executive director.

Faircloth noted that a market study conducted for the museum suggested that half of the museum’s patrons will come on weekends, when parking is plentiful in the downtown.

Buses filled with schoolchildren on field trips would likely make up the majority of the museum’s weekday traffic, Faircloth added, so parking would be less of an issue.

However, summertime and school vacations could put a strain on downtown parking with families – and hopefully tourists – more likely to drive into the downtown during weekdays, he said.

“It would be a good problem to have,” Faircloth said Thursday of the possibility of large crowds coming to the museum and, thus, the downtown business district. “There’s no way to really know until it happens.”

The Pickering Square garage, just across the park from the Maine Discovery Museum, is not the only parking area in demand, city officials say.

The downtown has between 900 and 1,000 on-street parking spaces and 1,800 off-street spaces, and high demand for convenient lots prompted Tremble’s committee to take a hard look at downtown parking.

As part of its recommendations, accepted last month by the full council, the committee also increased rates at nearly all of the city’s off-street lots. The new rates are expected to add nearly $76,000 to city coffers.

At Pickering Square, where the first two hours are still free, hourly parking rates increased by 50 cents to $1 and monthly rates increased from $38 to $45. Discounted parking on the garage roof went up from $19 to $25 per month.

Monthly fees for popular lots on Hammond Street and in Abbott Square across from the Bangor Library also increased by $10 and $5 respectively.

Even with those increases, coupled with an additional $84,240 in revenue expected from the additional floors in the Pickering Square garage, the city’s parking fund will still face a deficit, Tremble said.