In efforts to enhance the experience in downtown Yelm, councilors discussed the upcoming downtown parking lot and activated alleyway project at Oct. 24’s Yelm City Council meeting.
The council unanimously voted to approve a public services agreement with SCJ Alliance to engineer and design the one-way couplets, parking lot and activated alleyway. The agreement is not to exceed the amount of $262,230.50.
Yelm’s Public Works Director Cody Colt said the council has $1.3 million budgeted for the project, and the city will only spend $1 million total for design and construction. The city would then use the leftover funding to find grants in 2024 for the future one-way couplets.
Colt added he’s often asked why this project is going to cost the amount of money it will. He said two things need to happen when completing “something like this project.”
“One, is right-of-way acquisition. Some of these lots have right-of-way for driveway access or parking, and we have to pay [owners] to take away some of those things,” Colt said. “That requires a firm, lawyers to negotiate with them to get that cost and settle. That’s a big chunk of this contract. We want to be fair and give fair market value if someone is losing the ability to do something.
“The other part of this is community outreach,” Colt continued. “All of these business owners, if this is approved, will be brought in for design elements of this. We don’t want to build something that isn’t useful to them.”
Colt said the alleyway will be an extension of the businesses. He added the alleyway would create opportunities for food trucks to sell their product, provide power plug-ins for vendors and create ample lighting along the alleyway.
“Our goal is to make the alleyway as good as possible for (local businesses) and for us,” Colt said. “If it doesn’t work the way they want it, we can adjust it. We’ll bring it back to the council, and we will make it look slightly different.”
The other aspect for this project is the parking lot, which Colt said is being created “for the future.”
“(The parking lot) will be designed in a way that will allow for it to be raised up. We aren’t going to put the elements in there yet, but it will have a design that will allow it to turn into a parking garage at some point. We’re not installing those elements, we’re just getting that design done.”
He added the future parking lot will have added electrical infrastructure to support electric vehicle chargers.
The city chose to address the parking lot and activated alleyway phases of this project first because they’re the least-expensive options and because they’d be finished the soonest. If everything goes according to schedule, Colt believes the parking lot could be completed before next summer.
He added that increasing parking availability in the downtown corridor is a priority, as limited parking has been a “common complaint” among downtown business owners. He said additional parking will allow businesses to grow and expand and not worry about having to provide a certain number of parking spaces per square foot.
“If we have parking nearby, they can expand without having to meet those requirements because there’s on-street parking available,” Colt said.
He said the future parking lot will have 65 spots for community members, but more might be added in the future. He said, in total, downtown Yelm would house 100-plus more parking spaces with the addition of the lot, active alleyway and the rights-of-way that comes with it.
