TheBurg News - Greater Harrisburg's Community Magazine
Issue link: http://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/548742
16 | The Burg | 08.15 I n 2011, Adam Meinstein, a Philadelphia-based real estate developer, bought an abandoned post office on the outskirts of downtown Harrisburg. In many ways, the property was a natural fit for Meinstein's company, an investment and development firm called Equilibrium Equities. Founded in 1995, the company invests in industrial facilities in the northeast, mostly in Pennsylvania. e old post office, formerly the Keystone branch of the United States Postal Service, was the region's primary sorting facility for 50 years. Located on Market Street, just east of the Mulberry Street bridge, it sits on an 11-acre parcel in a former industrial zone, adjacent to several parking lots and warehouses. e property also had two notable features: it bordered an Amtrak station, and it contained an out-of-use parking lot with hundreds of open spaces. ese had also caught the eye of the state Department of Transportation, which had been looking for ways to remedy a problem with the Harrisburg train station. Because of the cost of parking downtown, riders would often opt to depart from nearby stations, like Elizabethtown or Mt. Joy, where they could park free of charge. "People make decisions not to come to Harrisburg to take the train because of the cost and other challenges associated with parking," Toby Fauver, PennDOT's deputy secretary for multimodal transportation, told me. e agency considered developing the post office lot as a transit center, but when they contacted the postal service, they learned it was already under contract with Meinstein. In early 2013, Meinstein and PennDOT struck a deal. e agency would sign a five-year lease of the property, and Meinstein in turn would develop and market the lot, under the name Transitpark, as a parking option for Amtrak riders. It wasn't a typical lease, however. PennDOT would pay Meinstein $285,000 per year, but it wasn't reserving any spaces. Instead, the lot would be available for public use, and some portion of the proceeds, after paying the lot's operating costs, would flow back to the agency to "offset" its payments. e state would also pay an initial $300,000 for ticket machines and other upgrades to get the lot up and running. Meinstein, meanwhile, would offer parking at a discount to Amtrak riders, who could park all day for $5 with a validation from machines inside the station. (Without the validation, Transitpark's rates are slightly more expensive than the city's, at $7 per day and $40 per month, compared with $6 and $35, respectively, in the neighboring 10th Street lot.) Around the time the lease was being negotiated, another arm of state government was working out a different sort of parking deal. As part of a complicated bailout of the city's debt crisis, the state sought to borrow heavily against Harrisburg's parking system to generate upfront cash. To cover the new debt, prices would be raised, the system would be outsourced to a private operator and the state would enter into a long-term contract to rent spaces. e result was the much-publicized new parking regime, currently halfway through its second year. Standard Parking, a corporation headquartered in Chicago, runs the day-to-day operations in the city's stead, aggressively enforcing higher meter rates ($3 per hour downtown) with increased fines ($30, up from $14). Money from the system goes to pay bondholders—in 2014, Harrisburg parkers indirectly paid debts totaling nearly $10 million. A portion of it, critically, also goes to the city, which is counting on parking proceeds this year to fund fully 10 percent of its budget. As part of the agreement, the city had to make a promise. In essence, it pledged to stifle competition from other lots in the downtown zone. Existing private lots could continue to operate, but the city was forbidden from permitting new ones to open—a simple-sounding rule that has led to some tricky deliberations. Take Executive House, an apartment tower at the corner of 2nd and Chestnut. e building has always rented out spaces in its private lot, but lawyers for the city are now researching exactly how many. If they find the landlord has added new rental spaces that aren't "grandfathered," it may order them to cut back again. Or consider the small, private lot across the street from McGrath's on Locust. e lot was "existing" at the time of the city's agreement—it has offered parking since 1999—but in 2007 it lost a zoning petition to stay open. e owner sued, and the case lingered in the courts unresolved. e city is now ordering it to close. Recently, the state has seemed particularly keen to see the city make good on its promise by shutting these private lots down. One advisor described them as "rogue operations" that the city must "nip in the bud." Yet the Transitpark lot, though across the street from a lot in the city system, seems not to concern them. As a matter of scale, this is surprising: the Meinstein lot contains some 750 spaces, while these "rogue operations" total only a few dozen. In June, at a regional transportation meeting, a PennDOT employee brought up Transitpark, describing it as a way to avoid Harrisburg parking prices and save some money. Wayne Martin, the city engineer, was perplexed. Every dollar spent on that lot was one that could have gone towards the city. "e Commonwealth is competing against itself," he thought. He went back to city hall and told the mayor. parallel parkinG e state has urged Harrisburg to crack down on "rogue" parking operations. en why is it subsidizing the city's largest competitor? By PAuL BArker IN The Burg