Colorado has made huge cuts to higher education funding. So what does the CSU Administration plan to do about that?
Answer: spend up to $93 million of on three new parking garages!
University officials say the development is not directly connected with the proposed on-campus football stadium a few blocks away, but acknowledge the additional parking would be useful on game days. They say the garages, with space for thousands of cars, would primarily serve the growing campus and the nearby MAX bus rapid-transit service.
A parking garage to serve a BRT stop? And it gets better…two of the garages will be situated in protected wetlands:
The $43 million Bay Farm garage project envisions twinned parking structures with a combined capacity of up to 2,400 cars. The garages would be built in the vacant fields behind the Hilton, in space opened up by this fall’s redesign of the city’s Spring Creek Trail.
Because the area is in a floodway, CSU is limited in what it can build there. Regulations generally bar buildings such as offices, shops or homes from being built in floodways, but parking garages are allowed.
That is one giant loophole which needs to be closed.
I can’t even see how those garages will be useful for daily use. The South Campus (the buildings cut off by the image) doesn’t have anything close to a parking problem, and the main academic buildings are all anywhere from 1/2 to a mile to the north – a longer walk then many would want to make, especially with the narrow sidewalks along Centre.
Besides, the issue of access remains. Commuters from other Front Range cities coming in along I-25 and Prospect Road don’t seem likely to drive past and then turn away from the campus to park. Access from the south and southwest (along Drake and Shields) would likely be southwest Fort Collins residents who would probably be more likely to switch to the (skeletal) bus system or bike in when prompted to park a mile away.
What is most likely prompting the garage plans is a new CSU football stadium planned for the corner of Lake and Meridian a few blocks away. As the stadium is (right now) supposed to be built without tax or tuition dollars, and happens to replace an existing commuter parking lot, my theory is this is a way to artificially reduce the cost of the stadium itself by making the new garages look like they are for regular traffic, but as above, the number of non-game-day users is likely to be minimal.
God, Fort Collins. A while back the city actually proposed rail service to Denver. Seems like a long time ago.