The University is paving the way toward construction of a 153-space parking lot on the Willamette riverfront in its six-fold effort to redistribute parking eliminated from campus construction.
Frances Dyke, University vice president for finance and administration, sent the formal land use application for the Northside Parking Lot’s construction to the city last month to ensure ample student parking will be available for the coming academic year.
The next step is a public hearing for Eugene Planning Division deliberations on Wednesday, July 28 about a set of land-use change proposals that would allow construction to begin.
The 153-space Northside Parking Lot will be constructed on a vacant property owned by the City of Eugene north of the University, with an estimated completion date of January 2011. Riverfront Research Park lies to the northeast of the site, while the University’s urban farm and fine arts studios form its western boundary with the Millrace Bike Path directly to the south.
Steve Ochs, an associate planner for the city’s Planning and Development Department, is the lead city staff member for the project.
According to the 2010 University of Oregon Parking Plan, which proposes development of six different parking areas, current and planned construction projects in east campus have created a sort of land grab. Newly constructed buildings such as the Alumni Center and the Jaqua Academic Center for Student-Athletes have taken up hundreds of prime-location parking spaces, and the office of Campus Planning and Real Estate is attempting to make up for this loss by reorganizing the supply of student and staff parking to the east and north of campus.
“The East Campus Residence Hall project is the most recent project that will affect the parking supply east of campus,” the newest version of the parking plan states. “It will displace roughly 300 parking spaces in the Bean Hall parking lot, (and) the UO will construct an equal or greater number of replacement spaces to compensate for this loss.”
Since fall 2008, the University’s baseline supply of daily parking has been hovering slightly above 3,000 spaces, and by winter of 2011, the school expects this number will increase to almost 3,700.
The Matthew Knight Arena’s $15 million underground parking structure alone will provide 377 new parking spaces, which, according to the parking plan, will fulfill the plan’s general goal of lessening University-related parking in surrounding campus neighborhoods.
Along these same lines, the plan expects that the Northside Lot’s proximity to Agate Street and Franklin Boulevard will remove parking stresses along the riverfront, and will be more convenient than the Arena and Bean lots for University functions just north of campus.
In addition to boosting parking spaces in the area, the new lot will also indirectly benefit the surrounding community by incorporating permeable asphalt paving and a large drainage course called a bioswale to help treat and drain storm water runoff into the Millrace.
The urban farm will also be given the opportunity to plant a native, edible landscape garden along the site’s southern and western boundaries.
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