Parking Garage Economics

Leasing or selling public parking garages to shore up finances. Readers of the Institute’s work will recall days of yore around 2009 and 2010 when the City of Pittsburgh had a plan to lease the garages and meters to put the proceeds into the pension system. That did not happen, but the details of the plan are touched upon here, here, and here.

The idea did keep traction in the capital city of Harrisburg: we wrote in June 2011 that the Act 47 recovery plan for Harrisburg mentioned the possibility. Instead of paying off pensions, the 2012 final recovery plan noted "if the parking assets are included in the debt solution, the proceeds from the parking assets transaction will first need to be applied to repay the existing debt of the Harrisburg Parking Authority. The remaining proceeds…could potentially be used to pay a portion of the incinerator debt and to contribute over time to address a portion of the City’s structural deficit".

Such deals can be quite complex and raise a lot of questions. One that was raised in a news article is whether the Harrisburg arrangement is a lease or a sale. When the arrangement involves not leasing the garages to a private interest but a state-level economic development authority who will also involve another local non-profit economic development agency and then two private interests will have a role in managing property and parking operations, things can get a bit complex.

Why the involvement of the other authority and the non-profit? Because locals were worried "…that parking rates could increase out-of-control to boost profits while the assets themselves could languish and degrade in the hands of a company with no long-term interest in the welfare of the city." Similar thoughts arose many times during the debate in Pittsburgh. Of course, it is safe to assume that policymakers in both cities did not contemplate that a private operator would have to pay property taxes (unlike a municipal or authority owner), collect parking taxes, pay expenses, and still make a profit while recognizing that simply imposing higher rates would eventually result in a drop in parking customers.