Airport officials say the garage, to open in 2005, will add several thousand parking spaces and subtract countless headaches.
By JEAN HELLER
Published August 20, 2004
[Special to the Times]
An artist's rendering shows Tampa International Airport's planned parking garage. Construction is scheduled to begin in January, with the first phase of the structure ready for use by November 2005.
TAMPA - If all goes according to plan, the upcoming holiday season could be the last to see a parking crunch at Tampa International Airport - at least for a few years.
In what promises to be a delicate balancing act, airport officials say they hope to start construction of a new, six-level remote economy parking garage in mid January, to be finished before Thanksgiving of 2005 - and then build phase II of the garage in the same 10-month window in 2006.
Airport officials say the new garage will offer improved shuttle service to the main terminal, air-conditioned waiting rooms and electronic signboards telling motorists on which garage level they'll find the most available parking. They say they hope to make the new facility so user-friendly that it will change traditional parking patterns.
On Wednesday, for example, not normally a busy day in mid summer at TIA, the long-term parking garage was full.
"We have to figure out how to get people to use this (new) facility," said Louis Miller, executive director of the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority. "We're through expanding up near the terminal. There is no place left to go."
There are height restrictions for buildings on and around the airport to allow for a clear line of sight from the control tower to aircraft and to allow planes plenty of room to get over the structures. The short- and long-term garages close to the terminal can't go up or out any more.
The new garage will sit on part of what is now the asphalt remote economy parking lot. The first phase will create 3,966 spaces and the second phase, which would expand the six floors, 1,705 spaces. But because some spaces from the lot will be covered over, the net gain in spaces will be 4,428, bringing the total available in all facilities to 19,360, an increase from the current 14,932 capacity.
If third and fourth phase expansions are built, they could add another 9,711 spaces.
The floors of the remote garage initially will be 8 acres each, compared to 11 acres for the floors of the long-term garage.
While the new garage will relieve some of the hassles of holiday parking, the cost likely will be higher than the $7-a-day, $42-a-week fees currently charged for the uncovered lot near the post office at the south end of the airport property.
"We have to balance out the usage of the parking facilities, and the best way to do that is by adjusting fees," said airport spokeswoman Brenda Geoghagan. "We'll be doing a lot of studying. But this will be covered parking with other amenities, so it probably will be more expensive."
The new structure will have two elevator cores and shuttle buses will stop at each location, so the longest walk from a vehicle to a bus will be 250 feet.
The Aviation Authority board gave preliminary approval for the two-year, $71-million project Thursday at a budget workshop. A final vote will come at a regular board meeting in September.
Even the new garage won't satisfy demand at peak times, Miller said.
"At Christmas and Thanksgiving, we're still going to overflow our facilities, but we've got an additional 3,000 spaces in what's left of the remote economy lot that we can open up," he said.
Most of the year those spaces will not be used, Miller said, because the covered garage and air-conditioned waiting rooms are better for airport customers and easier to manage and secure.
Airport officials say they hope this project will get them through until some time between 2020 and 2025, when a second terminal complex will have to be built north of the existing facility.
But passenger counts have been rising steadily at the airport since late last year, now far outpacing the record months of 2000, before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In July, the number of passengers boarding flights at TIA was 11.4 percent higher than in July 2000; in June, the numbers were up 10.4 percent.
