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Getting started: Houghton parking deck committee holds first meeting

Michigan Tech University, City of Houghton Mike Needham (left) and Tom Merz (right) are both members of the city of Houghton Planning Commission. The task at hand for the Planning Commission is to determine how to handle the parking deck in downtown Houghton.

HOUGHTON — Houghton’s Lakeshore Drive parking deck committee set officers and meeting times at its first meeting Tuesday.

The initial members are Planning Commission members Tom Merz, Eric Waara, Mike Needham and Dan Liebau.

Merz, the chairperson of the Planning Commission, will hold the same title on the committee. Liebau was named vice-chairperson and Needham secretary. Needham and Liebau will share duties reporting to the full commission.

Meetings will be held at noon on the first and third Tuesday of the month. As with the master plan committee, the parking deck committee will hold off on appointing any citizen members to the committee until the city council decides whether it will approve precharrette work. The precharrette would define the scope of a potential charrette, a collaborative process that the city has used in forms such as the design of the skate park.

Michigan State University’s National Charrette Institute has sent a precharrette proposal to the city. Merz said the cost would be about $7,000.

“I think the main reason for doing it … is to get educated about having the public involved in the issues we’re going to be dealing with,” he said. “I think this has value and we should do it.”

The parking deck committee will next meet on April 6.

Needham said the committee’s first priority should be to agree on its goal and what it should ultimately deliver to the Planning Commission. Once that happens, it will have a better idea what expertise would be needed from the wider community, he said.

“I don’t think any of the conversation we’re going to have is going to be about the potential for some future developer to try to propose the same thing that happened already, because in my opinion, that ship’s sailed,” he said. “I really think we need to talk about the parking deck and what we’re going to do to address its shortcomings right now.”

The deck, built in 1978, has required a growing amount of stopgap repairs in recent years. In 2019, the city put out a request for qualifications for firms looking to build a mixed-use development on the site. The city picked The Veridea Group of Marquette, which withdrew from negotiations in January, citing uncertainty about a path forward.

Waara said as the city returns to in-person meetings, there might be public hearings about the deck, or open house sessions with maps where the public can submit ideas.

The committee was one of two formed by the Planning Commission last month. The other, which is updating two chapters of the city’s master plan, had its first meeting March 9.

Both committees are an outgrowth of the city council’s charge to the planning commission in January to review the history of the parking deck, the development history with Veridea’s proposal and recommendations on how to proceed with issues such as maintenance of the aging deck.

A study last year by Pierce Engineering found the deck had kept deteriorating since the most recent major repairs in 2013, and that “from a life cycle perspective, the structure has probably reached its useful life.”

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