A number of city officials were on hand Tuesday to cut the ribbon for the new 744-car parking garage at St. Mary Hospital. The parking garage is adjacent to the hospital, between Third and Fourth streets on Clinton Street.
The hospital will lease 300 of the 744 spaces to its nurses, doctors and staff, and operate the ground floor professional medical office space. Another 300 spaces are set aside for Hoboken residents on a monthly basis. The final 144 spaces are slated to be used as transient parking spaces.
The 99-year lease between the city and hospital, which was signed on Dec. 21, 2000, outlines a public-private partnership in which the hospital donated the bulk of land to the Hoboken Parking Authority. In turn, the Authority was scheduled to build, own and operate the facility.
Now that the Hoboken Parking Authority has been dissolved and the city has assumed all the obligations of the HPA, the city owns and will operate the facility.
According to officials from the Hoboken Parking Utility, hospital employees will pay $125 a month for a space; Hoboken residents will pay $150 a month for a space or $250 a month for a specific reserved space; and transient parking spaces start at $3 for an hour and will go up to $20 for 24 hours.
According to Joanne Serrano, the acting executive director of the Hoboken Parking Utility, there are over 100 people on a waiting list to get a spot in the garage. Hoboken residents can get on the waiting list by calling (201) 653-1919.
The visually appealing brick garage was designed by local architect Dean Marchetto. The block-long facade is broken into smaller 25 foot facade segments, each with its own copper cornice, designed to fit into the scale and rhythm of historic Hoboken brick and brownstone buildings.
“Certainly, parking is at a premium [in Hoboken],” said Mayor David Roberts Tuesday at the ribbon cutting. “This garage frees up 744 on-street parking spaces, which is a step in the right direction.”
The addition of the Midtown Garage raises the city’s off-street parking inventory by more than 1,000 in the past six months. The 312-car automated parking garage at 916 Garden St. opened in October.
Welcomed by hospital
According to Bon Secours and Canterbury Partnership for Care, which owns St. Mary Hospital, the opening of the parking garage will help alleviate two of St. Mary’s biggest problems: parking and its undersized emergency room.
The current emergency room will expand into the space where the hospital’s outdoor parking lot is now. According to Marie Droege, site administrator for the hospital, the expansion will provide enough space to comfortably handle up to 55,000 emergency room visits a year.
The larger emergency room is needed to keep up with the growing number of patients treated there annually. The physical capacity of the present emergency department is listed at 16,000 patients a year, but hospital staff treated approximately 30,000 patents last year, Droege said.
According to Droege, the emergency room expansion will cost the hospital approximately $5 million and take 18 months to complete once construction starts. She added that the hospital expects to have an official groundbreaking in June or July.
Joan Quigley, Bon Secours’ vice president of external affairs, said Tuesday that emergency room expansion is crucial to the hospital’s future growth.
“[The hospital expansion] is really the most important thing,” she said. “The people of Hoboken will be able to get better service and will even have a place to park when they get here.”
Political sidenotes
The St. Mary garage project caused a bit of political bickering last week.
Foes of Mayor David Roberts complained that they weren’t invited to the ribbon-cutting. They also claimed that Roberts had voted against the garage back when there were condemnation and bond issue votes before the City Council on it. The project was actually voted on by the Hoboken Parking Authority, but the council was charged with voting on condemnation proceedings against six people living in a building on the property, as well as a $36 million bond guarantee.
But Roberts did, according to City Director of Administration, vote in favor of finalizing condemnation of the property in September 1998. It was a unanimous vote of the City Council, according to Drasheff. In 1999, there were several relocation resolutions that went before the City Council, and at that time, Roberts voted against them because he did not believe that the tenants, who were seniors, two of whom were nuns, were adequately taken care of before condemnation of the property began.
At the time, Roberts said publicly that that’s why he had voted against the resolution.
Roberts also voted “no” when the HPA approached the City Council to guarantee $36 million in new bonds. The HPA’s bond issue also covered the refinancing of the automated garage at 916 Garden St. Roberts said at the time that relocation issues were the reason he voted against guaranteeing the bonds. It was also around the time that he had broken with Mayor Anthony Russo.
Councilman Tony Soares, a former Roberts ally who is now against him, also voted “no” on the HPA’s request for a guarantor. So did current City Council President Ruben Ramos, who is a Roberts supporter.
Roberts said last week that he always supported adding parking spaces and the concept of the garage.
After a lawsuit, the tenant issue was resolved, with each tenant getting $17,500 to relocate.
Opponents of Roberts-backed candidates in the May City Council elections also complained last week that they were not given an invitation to attend the event.
Those who are not on a council campaign slate supported by Roberts – Tony Soares, Theresa Castellano, and Carol Marsh – said Tuesday that the administration did not invite them.
Former Mayor Anthony Russo, who helped orchestrate the deal with the hospital, also was not invited. Russo is running against Roberts’ candidate, Roseanne Andreula, in the 3rd Ward, where the garage is located.
Also not invited were any of the members of the now-dissolved Hoboken Parking Authority, the quasigovernmental agency that supervised most of the garage’s construction.
Castellano, who is running in the 1st Ward in May, had harsh words for the mayor. “He voted against this project and even made a campaign issue out of it,” she said. “Now he’s cutting the ribbon.”
Soares also criticized the mayor’s cutting of the ribbon. “The mayor was never a supporter of this project, which only proves this was nothing more than a pre-election ‘photo op,’ ” he said. He added that all one has to do is look at who was invited to be in the ribbon-cutting picture.
Every councilperson who was in the picture is currently running for re-election on Roberts’ ticket.
Mayor Roberts said last week that he wasn’t sure who on his staff had done the inviting for the event, but that it hadn’t been done by him. Thus, he said, he did not know who had been and hadn’t been invited. –Tom Jennemann