A couple of editorial notes:
• First, the Aggieville development.
The city government is exploring the idea of allowing a public parking lot to be eliminated, turned into some sort of development. This is the lot just north of Laramie Street and west of 12th Street, generally behind Kite’s and the former Last Chance, now known as Johnny Kaw’s Yard Bar.
That lot has 100 parking spaces. Presumably a development there would get rid of all those parking spaces. City commissioners last week told staffers to put out a formal “request for proposals,” to see what any interested developer would propose. The only caveats: They said they don’t want a hotel, and they don’t want a parking garage.
There’s already a hotel under construction in Aggieville. A parking garage? Yes, there’s one of those also in the works. It’s a $13.8 million project that will add a net 370 parking places to the Aggieville inventory. Perhaps the thinking is this: Well, we’re up by 370, so we can easily kill off 100 and still be a net ahead. Perhaps the city is thinking that a private development would mean more tax money coming into the city treasury. Those are not entirely unreasonable thoughts.
But there ought to be a pretty high bar to jump over, for obvious reasons. This whole discussion just raises a bunch of awkward questions.
If there’s enough of a parking problem in Aggieville for the public to pay for a $13.8-million garage, then it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to get rid of 100 spaces a couple of blocks away. Put another way: If we’re willing to bulldoze a 100-slot parking lot, what are we coughing up nearly $14 million for?
Is there a problem or isn’t there? The problem, or so we’ve been told, is that developers and/or big retailers don’t want to come to Aggieville because they don’t see big, open parking lots right in front of their stores. If that’s real, then before we entertain proposals for a new development, we need some strong evidence that the old parking lot is unnecessary. If that evidence shows that there’s not really a need for parking in that area, then maybe we can quit tearing up the lot next to Rally House.
• Second, we need to tip the cap to the Manhattan-Ogden school board and the school district’s staff. They’ve just gone through the tortured process of redrawing school attendance boundaries, a thankless task if ever there was one. There’s never any way to make everyone happy.
The district had to do that in the midst of a pandemic, when public hearings are difficult to pull off, and where people’s tempers are already short. They ditched the option that included sending kids from Miller Ranch to Ogden Elementary on a bus, a flashpoint. That was smart.
There will be problems. There always are. But we need to thank the people who guided this process for doing their best in very difficult circumstances.
