Cambridge paved the way for shared parking lots, but opening its own school garage isn’t so simple

The question was asked in community meetings before the new King Open/Cambridge Street Upper School Complex was built: Can residents use the complex’s parking garage when school’s out?

Nine years later, as bike and bus lanes have removed more on-street parking across Cambridge, the City Council is still asking. Staff have no answers beyond saying that the garage wasn’t built to accommodate nonschool uses and suggesting that deference in setting a policy must be paid to the School Committee and Cambridge Public Schools district – where the topic is heading toward a Building & Grounds Subcommittee meeting.

That meeting, discussed at an April 15 committee meeting, has not been scheduled, according to the body’s online calendar.

“This is a citywide, multiuse complex. It was built with the intent to be available for the entire community,” said councillor Patty Nolan at a Monday meeting that discussed the garage. Nolan recalled talking about the garage while being on the School Committee. “It’s a building built with public funds for the public good. It includes a library. It includes the school administration as well as two schools. It’s in a part of the city where for a year and a half people in the community had thought this was a question that would be asked. That’s why you’re hearing a little bit of frustration.”

The city passed zoning in December that lets businesses share their off-street parking or convert it to commercial use. Deadlines to install bike lanes on Main Street, Cambridge Street and Broadway were even changed to accommodate time to write and enact that zoning, though the Transportation Department said last month that its effect was unknown. “We’re not able to tell people what to do with their off street parking, but we have made it easier for them to opt to make it available,” department head Brooke McKenna said.

The King Open/Cambridge Street Upper School Complex actually removed parking from the neighborhood – taking an accessible surface lot with 55 spaces and replacing it with less-accessible underground parking for 105. “Parking was a top concern for residents in the area,” a city spokesperson said in a community notice before construction of the complex.

Jose Luis Rojas Villarreal, chair of the education officials’ grounds subcommittee, noted that as a neighbor of the site, he’d used that “very large parking lot” himself, “so I can see someone thinking that that should be good to have access.”

At the same time, more teachers and staff at the schools than fit in the underground lot need to park during the day and struggle to find spaces on the street. Mayor E. Denise Simmons, who leads the School Committee as part of her duties, pondered a policy that granted the public access to the garage if teachers from out of town could get daytime parking permits.

But members are wary – Richard Harding said granting access to school parking could be opening a “Pandora’s box” – and Rojas said it’s “a very different proposal to have access to a secure place.”

Not built to be shared

The garage is not designed for public use, as it gives access to the schools, city manager Yi-An Huang told councillors Monday, meaning there would have be an exploration of “converting it into more public use and to better understand how we might do that while also protecting the security of our school.”

“Those options may come with a price tag,” said Huang, who was not city manager when the building was designed and built. “This is not a light switch that we can just flip on. We are certainly communicating with the superintendent and the School Committee that it’s important to the city, it’s important to those neighborhoods and we would like to see some options for how we might be able to get that done.”

It’s even more complicated, said vice mayor Marc McGovern, another former School Committee member. There will be nights that there are school events, meaning more parking will be needed for families who attend. It’s hard to distinguish who’s coming to a school event and who’s just going to a nearby restaurant, he said.

But the fact that the new citywide zoning imposes no control over private businesses suggested a need for the city to act, he said. “We do have some control over our spaces, right, making it all the more important that we should try to activate those as much as we possibly can?” he said.

“This is a multiuse property and we want to make sure that it remains and continues to look like that for the community – multiuse that is inclusive of the whole community,” said councillor Ayesha Wilson, who tabled a city manager’s report on the garage Monday to be sure it could be picked up again quickly.

Caroline Hunter, vice chair of the School Committee, sounded agreeable at the April meeting. “We all live in the same congested city, and we all have born the brunt, even in my neighborhood today, of tearing up and redistributing sidewalks, putting in curb cuts, and we all have to move the car, walk and talk or take the ticket,” Hunter said. “So I look forward to the conversation.”

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