Lets see, Google wants to open an office in Ann Arbor Michigan and will employ 1000 people. To get the deal, the owner of the office building had to offer Google 400 free parking spaces. So far so good. Happens all the time. However since the office building doesn’t have any parking the owner cut a deal with the city to provide the parking to Google, for free.
Lets see — Google is the hottest company in the country now with billions in the bank. Everyone wants them on their doorstep. OK. However the city really doesn’t have the spaces available for "free." They really need 600 grand to pay for them. There are other issues concerning overloading the downtown parking structures but lets just forget that for the moment. After all, we want Google to move in.
So, why doesn’t the landlord just pay for the parking spaces out of the lease? If he built a building without parking and was relying on nearby city parking, then he should pay the freight.
OH, the city wants those 1000 jobs and will do almost anything to get them.
See, there is no such thing as FREE parking
JVH
One Response
Ann Arbor is in the midst of getting a new underground structure built near the Google building, on what’s now called the “library lot”. The argument is that too many structure are full all the time.
At the same time, some development work has been done independently of the Ann Arbor DDA, which resulted in a handful of mobile phone and iPhone apps for efficiently finding parking. After these were announced they were actively blocked by the DDA.
The full chronology is here:
http://a2geeks.org/display/geek/A2+DDA+Realtime+Parking+Data
Two front page Ann Arbor News stories so far, one announcing the free parking information service at +1 734 272 0909 , the second one Saturday announcing the DDA’s decision to block. That phone number still works in the sense that it answers, but it returns “an unknown error has occurred”.
thanks
Ed