Parking offer for Tauranga Council

Philip Hunt is inviting the city council to invest in business car parking. Photo: Andrew Campbell.

A surprise offer of two floors of a soon-to-be-built car parking building in the central city was dropped on the city council transport committee at its first meeting of the year.

Ray White Real Estate director Philip Hunt made the offer while speaking about issues affecting the revival of central business district on Monday afternoon.

All the central business district needs for revitalising is to lease out all the city's first floor office space, says Philip.

When the first floor office space is full, there will be people on the street, shopping in the boutique shops and sitting in cafes.

And businesses are moving into the city. Apata Coolstores is relocating to First Ave, and they want to bring more staff in from Katikati, but they can't because they need four more carparks.

'It's a growing problem because other business are also moving into the city from their converted suburban houses, but are encountering the same issue,” says Philip.

'The developer of a new 70 room hotel on the former TEL site at 69 Durham Street is building four floors of carparking and offering the council the lease of two floors – that's 200 carparks.”

If they go about leasing out the carparks themselves it might take another year to 18 months before construction starts, but if the city council underwrites the two floors construction can start almost immediately, says Philip.

'It's really pie in the sky, very much pie in the sky.

'If council picked up on that and I would have to say given all things staying as they are now they may not need to exercise the underwrite or lease, because the demand is so great.”

Philip says the current building design would need some tweaking if the council did take on two floors of parking.

'This just shortens the time frame up and allows a pool of business parking and you heard that we need it.”

Kelvin Clout suggested staff investigate and come back with a report to the committee at a later meeting.

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2 comments

Brilliant Idea

Posted on 14-02-2017 07:42 | By Johnney

If the council committed to a 6 year lease on the space this would be a great partnership to kick things off. This would be more cost effective than wasting money on consultants for plans for CBD that never eventuate. Hopefully in 6 years we may have a public transport system that works and actually used. I say this is a no brainer.


golly gosh

Posted on 14-02-2017 14:23 | By old trucker

Someone makes a offer, and because they TCC didnt think about this (NOT Interested) thats right they would have to have team meetings and more meetings to Discuss this and more meetings with clip boards, and still not come up with anything, it must cost THOUSANDS of $$$$$ a year for meetings,my sixpence, SUNLIVE is the BEST for NEWS,10-4 out.


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