While the last half of the spring semester winds down at Austin Community College, design plans for a new parking garage at the Rio Grande Campus have been solidified.
The garage, one of two construction projects at the campus, will contain 456 parking spaces - at a cost of nearly $33,000 per space.
How ACC will use those spaces remains unclear, but for now, at least, students and faculty won't have to bear the brunt of the $15 million price tag through parking fees.
"Your regular parking tag will get you in there," said Executive Director of Facilities and Construction William Mullane, during an open forum at the RGC.
"Likely it would be possible that it would be treated like the State parking garages," said Mullane, surrounded by blueprints at the March 18 meeting. State parking garages are rented out nights and weekends. He also pointed out that "we have not been here before," concerning hundreds of useful and valuable parking spaces.
Construction on the six-level structure will begin in June - following the demolition of the Skill Center and faculty lot which currently occupy the site at the intersection of 12th Street and Shoal Creek Boulevard - and will offer a net gain of about 350 spaces.
"This will get us about a third of the additional spaces we need," Mullane said.
There is not yet a solid tally of how many spaces will be reserved for faculty and how many will be reserved for students in the garage.
Jay Barnes of Barnes Gromatzky Kosarek Architects, the firm given the task of designing the structure, said that his company intends to make the structure as "green" as possible: "a two-star rating is our threshold." Any number of things could achieve a two-star rating; using recycled building materials, sustainable lighting, or installing bike racks could achieve this.
Aside from parking, the garage will have 3,000 square feet of retail space fronting 12th Street. According to Mullane, "the intent is to move the bookstore in." This has been the only retail space to be confirmed within the new garage as of yet.
Construction on the campus' other major construction project, the renovation of the gymnasium, is already underway. According to officials, the "abatement of hazardous materials is nearly complete."
The exterior of the gymnasium will be virtually unchanged, with a low addition in the rear (facing the House Park parking lot) and a second level to the interior. According to the project architect, Mark Daniel Brown, "we flip-flopped whether or not to keep the original gym floor. We ended up deciding to replace it with a new steel deck."
"An awful lot of it had to be gutted," said Brown, referring to how the building has held up over time.
The renovation will add 10 new classes and 60 new faculty offices and 12,000 square feet to the original building. As far as the "hazardous materials" being abated from the aged building, they include lead paint, lead in the windowpanes, and asbestos.
While the community, faculty, and students should be relieved of some parking stress once the garage is complete, the issue of the major loss of parking space during construction was not addressed at the forum.
"There is a parking problem here, it's obvious," said Barnes. "[The garage] will solve some of the problems, not all of them." Sentiments echoed by project manager Pamela Collier months earlier.
"We are maxing out the number of cars we can get in there," Tommy Kosarek, Barnes' partner, exclaimed.
To avoid the current parking problems, students and faculty also have the option of Capital Metro's free Park and Ride program, which offers direct routes between most ACC campuses.
The gym and parking garage are both expected to be open by the fall of 2009.
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