BRADENTON, Fla. — More complexities and complications have emerged regarding growing parking issues in Manatee County.
Some of those concerns include safety. County officials said that efforts to address problems with one of the key public parking garages in downtown Bradenton need to move to the top of the priority list.
According to officials, their latest assessment shows while there’s no imminent danger of the garage collapsing, it is however progressively deteriorating.
The deputy director of Manatee County Property Management and Construction Services said the county garage at the corner of 10th Street and Manatee Avenue in downtown Bradenton is no longer functioning as it was designed due to wear and tear and age.
“It’s kind of like a living thing, it’s there and it’s moving around it, [but] when it gets hot, it swells up," Tom Yarger said. "With cars on it, it squashes down and whenever they get off, it bounces back up again. When you have cars going around, and turning movements and everything, there’s some torque, there’s a moment of inertia at the corners.
"All those kinds of things are making the building move and shift around a little bit in ways that it’s not really supposed to and so, it’s reacting the way anybody would."
According to Yarger, the garage structure, the deck ramp and the parking spaces have also become increasingly too small to withstand the weight and width of vehicles.
"It was built to a 1986 building code. It was not designed to handle the heavy cars that we have now and large vehicles that we have now so it is, like all garages will, starting to deteriorate and will need to be replaced,” he said.
At the Board of Commissioners' work session meeting earlier this week, Yarger presented the various garage construction needs in the county.
There are a total of four looming parking garage projects in the county including the downtown Bradenton garage. The vision for that location is to accommodate more than 1,000 parking spaces.
“We’re looking at maybe going to at least 11 floors which the top two would be office facilities and green space, then the next eight would be just parking in and parking areas and drive aisles and then the lot department will be retail potential,” Yarger said.
Once approved by the board, the projected estimate for the garage could run close to $100 million and take at least three years to complete.
Yarger said while the three-year window looks like a lot of time, there is a strict sense of urgency to avoid compromising the structural integrity and safety of the garage.
Right now, the county is putting out a Request for Qualification to the private sector to come up with suitable concepts.