Representatives of Olsson & BBN Architects design team, McCown-Gordon Construction, and the City of Manhattan joined together to lay the foundations that would light up Aggieville development on a otherwise dark, and overcast Friday.
Laying the foundations from which the Aggieville parking garage will rise, Mayor Usha Reddi thanked the Riley County Commission, as well as USD 383 board members for dedicating Aggieville as a TIF district.
This permits the city to capture development in property valuation — and accordingly, property charges — over a long term period inside a set limit for public redevelopment purposes.
(Courtesy of the City of Manhattan)
“This is a partnership between all government entities because we see the reason and the purpose to be a vibrant community. This is how we impact our community to not only survive, but also have the economic development necessary for our businesses to be successful,” Reddi said. “We are on the cusp of some wonderful things happening in Manhattan, and everyone is looking at us. When you see cranes and construction sites and everything happening in the middle of a pandemic, that’s positive news, and that’s not happening everywhere.”
McCown-Gordon Construction Senior Project Manager Barry Schmidt felt extremely honored to be part of this project and said he is looking forward to participating in a milestone project for this Manhattan business district.
“This is a culmination of a whole bunch of years of work… We are really excited and really looking forward to to the end result as well as the process along the way,” Schmidt said. “[At] McCown-Gordon, we’ve got about 49 associates that call Manhattan home. This legacy project, it’s really a milestone project for Aggieville and this holds a pretty special place for all of those associates and again we are very excited.”
This project is estimated at 17.7 million dollars and will draw revenue from Aggieville’s Tax Increment Financing district designation for an anticipated $11 to $12 million share of the project cost. The remainder is expected to be covered by the city’s 0.5 percent Economic Recovery and Relief sales tax which was approved by Manhattan voters, and set to initiate January 1, 2023.
Discussions to develop a parking garage first began in 2016 following the city’s “Aggieville Community Vision Survey”, which yielded over 4200 responses reflecting citizens’ desires for the future of Aggieville. Following Phase I & II of Zoning amendments in the Aggieville district through the Spring of 2019, plans were being developed through the summer by BBN Architects of Manhattan and the Olsson Studio of Kansas City.
Mark Bachamp, Vice President of Kansas Region Business Development at Olsson and Associates announced to the crowd gathered on the construction site that the end product of their planning had been worth the hundreds of hours the design team had spent over the last year.
“Every Friday at 11 o’clock, we’ve had meetings talking about how this thing was was being designed and laid out. And it really all started, as Usha mentioned about five years ago,” Bachamp said. “And I see a lot of Aggieville businesses here and really appreciate their effort in helping mold this. We’re looking forward to it as being a catalyst project for Aggieville and how it’s really gonna kick off a lot of good things.”
The former 79-spot Aggieville parking lot, the current site of the garage construction, on the corner of N. Manhattan and W. Laramie (by Rally House), was shut down on Wednesday, December 9th in anticipation of this development.
Construction is foreseen to begin with the parking area excavation this month and is forecast to last till January 2022, along with street renovations and signalization projects along Laramie Street between North Manhattan Avenue and 14th Street and upgrades of the existing 14th Street and Anderson Avenue intersection.
New parking regulations for the district will be implemented and staff will begin putting in new signage and issuing permits for the entirety of Aggieville and surrounding neighborhoods beginning in January of 2021 – as signs and staff are accessible.
In attendance was Jared Wasinger, Assistant to the City Manager, who highlighted that the city’s desire to emphasize three hour parking limits throughout all the surface stalls in the district from Monday through Friday was to increase turnover for businesses and reduce long term parking that is a systemic problem.
“So that those stalls aren’t being taken up and our customers, residents, and visitors can come in and out of the district throughout the day, we’re putting in place some of those three hour limits,” Wasinger said. “In City Park, a lot of ‘Long-term parkers’ park there for days. So, we’re trying to utilize the surrounding parking for this year, so people can get used to the district and access the businesses.”
Wasinger said once the parking garage is constructed in January 2022, the city will develop and implement their full parking management plan, which addresses paid parking, garage programs for workers, residents, and visitors as well as addressing existing street parking.
When completed, this facility will offer around 500 parking spots, bicycle storage area, add around 8,000 square feet of expected retail/office/occupant space, and be compositionally viable with Aggieville.
The new rear entryway will make an extraordinary and welcoming gathering space for organizations behind the garage and will allow safe passage from there to those organizations onward towards Moro Street and Triangle Park.
