At a community meeting a couple of weeks ago, St. John’s Hospital officials said they wanted to delay building the underground parking for 440+ cars, which was included in a 1998 Development Agreement, for another 10 years, and asked the City to grant them an extension.
Hospital neighbors, who had repeatedly protested the size and scope of the project in 1998, specifically citing parking problems, and have endured a chronic shortage of parking on their streets, as well as the noise, dirt and disruption of major demolition and construction for more than a decade, were properly outraged.
St. John’s, which is one of a number of hospitals operated by the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, said, in the meantime, it planned to lease “unused” parking space, which, of course, is less a solution than another sort of problem.
Wednesday night, the Planning Commission will address that question at a special meeting on a matter left over from a previous meeting – parking at the Yahoo Center on Colorado Avenue.
Yahoo wants to amend its development agreement with the City, reducing the number of on-site parking spaces for its tenants and increasing the number of spaces it leases to off-site businesses, specifically St. John’s, to over 1,000.
St. John’s is simultaneously asking for an amendment to allow it to lease some 1,500 spaces under the “shared parking” strategy allowed by the city’s Land Use and Circulation Elements (LUCE) instead.
If the Planning Commission approves the amendments, and the City ratifies them, Yahoo will get what it wants, and St. John’s will get what it wants, but the neighbors will remain in limbo.
St. John’s valet parking attendants will spend their days driving cars seven blocks to Yahoo, and seven blocks back to St. John’s, in effect, radically increasing the traffic on some of our busiest streets, while many St. John’s employees will inevitably park in the neighborhood – to save time and money, and the neighbors will continue to suffer the consequences of St. John’s failure to do what it agreed to do years ago, and the City’s failure to require St. John’s to build the on-site parking before granting it a Certificate of Occupancy.
Here and now, the Planning Commission should insist that St. John’s abide by the 1998 Development Agreement and build the on-site underground parking garage – without further delay. Anything else would be a betrayal of the neighbors and the principles the City claims are the basis for its key policies.