The special meeting Wednesday of the Planning Commission to consider a proposed fifth amendment to the development agreement for the Yahoo center was canceled owing to lack of a quorum.

The amendment would revise the “current base parking ratio for office use from the current requirement of one parking space per 322 square of office floor area to one parking space per 500 square foot of office floor area and would also authorize leasing of up to 1,053 existing surplus parking spaces to off-site parties, consistent with the facility’s long-standing practice of leasing underutilized spaces while maintaining asufficient parking for its on-site tenants.”

The amendment is necessary because the Center’s current parking policies
violate the provisions of the development agreement. Colorado Center LLC,
the owner of the Center, maintains that the original parking provisions were
unrealistic, allotting more space to parking than was necessary.

St. John’s hospital, whose 1998 development agreement included a 440+
underground parking garage, which it has yet to build, recently asked the City to allow it to delay building the garage for another ten years. In the meantime, hospital officials said, they would set up a valet parking system and lease off-site parking spaces, including over 1,000 at Yahoo.

Like the Colorado Center officials, St. John’s managers were expecting the resolution of their parking dilemmas this week.

Development agreements permit the City to make concessions to developers in return for developers’ salting their projects with “public benefits,” but in far too many instances the developers fail to deliver, as St. John’s and Colorado Place have done, and the City fails to follow up on the agreements and require developers to do what they agreed to do.

Clearly, the City should stop trading favors and simply require that the
developments themselves benefit the public.