Moncton parking lot owner challenges city to abide by own rules
A Moncton developer is asking the city to follow its own rules.
Thierry Le Bouthillier opened a state of the art parking lot in the downtown on Jan. 1, but he's having trouble competing with his neighbour — a city-owned gravel lot that is not up to code.
Le Bouthillier invested $700,000 to build his 60-spot parking lot, complete with equipment imported from Italy, proper drainage, security lighting, landscaping, and LED screens.
Le Bouthillier's lot is up to city building codes, but he says the city-owned lot next door at the corner of Lewis and Queen Streets — which is dirt, with puddles and no proper entrances or exits — is not.
As one might expect, it was cheaper to park in the city's lot.
Couldn't compete
"We quickly realized a couple of weeks after we opened that nobody was coming over," said Le Bouthillier. "Nobody was calling for parking because our next door neighbours were charging $95 at that time."
"We've since lobbied and they increased it to $115 and now we had to match their price at $115. But $115 is not even our break-even point."
Le Bouthillier said if the city spent money to bring its lot up to code, it would probably want to charge more for parking.
"This is Moncton. We should be doing better than the wild, wild west of parking," he said.
"You have private developers, private investors doing things that are great in a structured way, complying to zoning and complying to code," he said. "And coming back down here you have gravel, no lines, no lighting and it's being accepted."
City developing plan
Deputy Mayor Shawn Crossman said city staff are working on a plan to figure out what to do with the city lot and when to do it.
But for now, the city isn't going to sink any money into this parking lot.
"Well there's some infrastructure that needs to be done in and around that area, around the Lewis Street and that area, and Queen Street," said Crossman. "So I don't really think it's really worth investing all that money into a parking lot at this point, if we're going to turn around and dig it up."
Crossman expects the city to have a plan in place for the area by June.
