RIP “Original” Parking Deck

 

Natural Death or Murder?

The “execution” papers were signed on Tuesday, January 28th, 2025. The executioner will be a company out of Birmingham named Tomlin Excavating which will provide the wrecking ball to finally put the old girl out of her misery. She was abused, neglected, and even set on fire but could not withstand a fight with city hall. The “original” parking deck is coming down.

There were a lot of pieces to the puzzle that finally put together the parking deck’s demise, but in this writer's opinion, the best interest of city hall politicians and not the best interest of the Florence taxpayers is what this situation has been about all along. It was decided almost 10 years ago by a “so-called” previous administration that this town needed to build a new parking deck or two to go along with the new city hall complex. Now bear in mind, at the time of this “decision” this “previous” administration had 4 of the current 6 people sitting on the council podium at the time who are STILL there. 1 on the council then, Andy Betterton is now mayor and Dick Jordan, the actual power behind the throne, is dead. But it seems his influence in governing lives on. Let me give you my take on the two parking decks and of one's untimely demise.

The mayor at the time, Steve Holt, had the good political and common sense to know that you could not spring too much on the taxpayer at once. After all, there was still improvements to be made to the sportsplex. But, as I said, the real power behind the throne, Dick Jordan and his “friends” around town, had other ideas on how they wanted to see the downtown area revised. They were throwing a bone to East Florence in the promise of an “Entertainment District” and a federally funded roundabout at Royal Ave and Huntsville Rd but if they got too aggressive with distributing tax money downtown where most of his pals owned the buildings that would benefit from TWO new parking decks, it would not be a good look. Of course, there was also the question of how to transfer the ECM property that the city had just had returned to their purview. 

Ol' Dick had a deal he wanted to go through with his “bestie” Joel Anderson who would get the property for practically nothing and then build a retail complex with the taxpayer footing the bill, but they would somehow have to sneak that in without too much attention being drawn. It would boost the property value of the shopping center his family had owned for decades on College St. Just the right amount of finesse was needed to make the plan work. Then a pandemic happened in the middle of a city election. Also, there were national issues that were getting played out locally and it seemed like the citizens of Florence were more interested in the national evening news than anything going on locally.

Sure enough, there were very few candidates who ran in each district for the election. And of the two candidates in the mayor's race, it really did not matter who won because they were both part of the regime. The “winner” was the more malleable of the two so Dick and friends had everything in place. The plan to spend millions on parking decks for the downtown area, a new city hall complex that could possibly be named for Dick Jordan and the plans for a shopping center/luxury housing complex on the former ECM property just sailed right through when it was time for the council to vote. The public either didn’t notice or didn’t care and it was all but a done deal. Things moved along and Dick even selected his replacement without an election and had him installed to implement this plan before he left the council. He eventually met the grim reaper. RIP Dick Jordan, everything was in place.

There were a few things that had been “accomplished” under the “Jordan” administration that have had lasting effects on the city of Florence. Some were good like the sportsplex, many were questionable. But the one that actually effected every single citizen of Florence the most was the rise in sales tax. Over Dick’s time from councilman to mayor to council president the sales tax had risen from 6% to 9.5%. This last raise which occurred during his time as president of the council, would be the one to put the downtown project over the top! It was supposed to be a raise in the sales tax to support higher salaries for firefighters and police. The police chief at the time, Ron Tyler had appeared before the council at a meeting and in no uncertain terms let the city know if something was not done about the pay there would be many officers leaving for areas which paid more. Some questioned this and even at the time the remarks from the public were mainly against this move. There is a video recording of this meeting on the Facebook page, Florence city council Vote Em All Out and I highly recommend everyone who is reading this to go to the page and find the recording and watch it. The fact that with this sales tax hike Florence would be paying the highest rate in North Alabama, higher than Huntsville or Decatur, was also discussed. As planned it seems, the agenda item was passed and the sales tax was raised. And it was not written in the resolution what this tax hike revenue would be used exclusively for so, there would be money to burn in the city coffers!

And all of that brings us back to the “original” parking deck and its demise. The original plan for the “city hall complex” going back about 10 years was to have a 6-story city hall complex and TWO parking decks. Build one at the corner of Tombigbee and Pine Streets and tear down the “original” at Tennessee and Pine. Instead of the larger 500+ parking space version like the “original” there would be two at around 300 spaces each. That way, the city employees could use one during “normal business hours” as had been the practice since “original” had been built and there would be another for retail shoppers and downtown business employees to use.

But there appeared a catch. After the pandemic, building prices soared. When the feelers were sent out to construction companies for bid amounts of how much it would cost to build the entire city hall and parking decks complex, they came back at twice what was originally planned. There was another problem. The original parking deck was starting to show what would happen to a structure if it had no maintenance for 40 or so years. Maintenance of buildings had never been a high priority in the city. The recreation center buildings are old and for the most part over the years just left alone to the elements. Most of the “maintenance” staff were actually yard crews. The parks are what the maintenance was all about.

The engineering firm, LBYD engineering out of Huntsville, back in 2018, had submitted a study paid for by the city that showed the current parking deck was in need of upgrades and repairs. This is sort of like an estimate from a roofing company on someone’s home. It is unclear whether it was deliberate or through negligence but from 2018 until the present day there was no maintenance done on the parking deck at the corner of Tennessee and Pine Streets. And it was starting to show. The study was ignored and no repairs made. And something needed to be done.

So, at this the mayor’s office went to work with a public relations campaign to turn lemons into lemonade. They had a piece of concrete that supposedly had fallen from the ceiling on one of the floors on the deck and a call was made to all the Huntsville television stations and of course a press release was written for the Times Daily to use to broadcast far and wide that the deck is falling apart. THE DECK IS FALLING! It is dangerous and must be replaced and come down as soon as possible. AND also, they would announce they had a plan for a shiny new deck to be built! The parking count at first was never given, but when the price tag came in at almost 30% higher than had been discussed in the original city hall complex plan in 2018, they had to gloss over the actual parking space count. It wasn’t smaller. It was MORE COMPACT! It had biking spaces! 

And it appeared the public would never be the wiser. Until some citizens questioned what was actually going on. And from there this tale of the original parking deck will end. The comedic tale of grief is not for the parking deck itself but for the situation this area has allowed itself to get into where the citizens are blindly led by the nose in whatever direction an elected official wants to take them and the lazy and complicit traditional news media leads without question. If it were not for social media sites such as Shoalanda and others, a complete propaganda pipeline would be all that people had available for local political news. Some think local events do not matter in their daily lives. I contend most vehemently that is not the case. This sentiment was relayed to me many years ago by a local political observer and I will end with it: WHAT HAPPENS ON PINE STREET CAN AFFECT YOUR EVERYDAY LIFE MUCH MORE THAN WHAT HAPPENS ON PENNSYLVANIA AVE.