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Over the summer, plans for a $33 million parking garage next to the American Airlines Center briefly became the focus of the ongoing feud between Ross Perot Jr., whose company was building the structure, and Mark Cuban, whose company opposed the project.
The garage was green-lighted by the City Council anyways, its funding secured by the expansion and extension of the Sports Arena TIF, which made another $68.9 million available for development in Victory Park and West Dallas. Today, the TIF’s board took up a second project that will be funded by the expansion: another parking garage.
The garage, which will be located on the northwest corner of Victory Park Lane and Museum Way, is being proposed by Victory Park UST Joint Venture I, the development’s German owners. To fund the 1,200-space garage, the developer wants $12.8 million from the TIF district.
This is all part of the vision for Victory Park spelled out in the agreement to expand the TIF district. The hope is to attract an additional 250,000 square feet of retail space and 3,000 residential units, give a facelift to property leading to Victory Park from West Dallas, make the whole thing more walkable and otherwise transform a development that has been something of an albatross into more of a going concern.
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First, though, comes parking. In addition to the garage on Museum Way, the TIF board was set to approve today the design for Perot’s garage and funding for a study of parking and car and pedestrian flow.
The idea seems to be that parking garages are preferable to the sprawling parking lots that currently surround the AAC and will both free up space for new development and foster a more pedestrian-friendly/pleasant environment. That’s probably true. It would have been nice if that had been thought of in the late-1990s.
