Starting Over: Officials Cancel City-Church Parking Lot Deal

Plymouth's plan to buy land owned by a downtown church and turn it into a parking lot is being re-evaluated.

According to an article in the Observer & Eccentric, officials from the city and the First Church of Christ, Scientist have mutually decided to cancel a pending purchase agreement and re-start negotiations from scratch.

The original plan was for the city to buy much of the property at Ann Arbor Trail and Harvey Street for $775,000 and use it for approximately 100 more parking spaces.

>>Read what City Commissioners had to say about the original purchase plan.

Mayor Dan Dwyer told the Observer & Eccentric that figuring out how church members would access their property in the middle of the parking lot became too complicated of an issue for the proposed agreement to work.

The article states that the city still plans to buy the property and that both sides will be working on a new agreement.

A shortage of public parking has long plagued the city. Of downtown’s 2,350 parking spots, just 40 percent are managed by the city, according to Rich and Associates, a parking firm hired by the city to analyze the city's downtown parking, which presented its findings to the city commission in August 2011.

The parking spaces that the city hopes to create with the church purchase would mostly be used by downtown employees, who saw about a dozen spots cut from a downtown parking garage last year.

Dwyer said in February that while the church property acquisition isn’t the perfect answer for downtown parking, it’s the best plan the city can afford.

>>Sign up for the Plymouth-Canton Patch newsletter here.