A repair project at a city-owned parking garage in Santa Maria that was expected to wrap up in weeks has now stretched for months, and the city is considering tearing the structure down entirely rather than fixing it.
The parking structure at Cook and McClelland streets, adjacent to the Santa Maria Town Center, has been partially closed since the city announced emergency repairs in April. At the time, the city estimated the project would cost roughly $3 million and take about four to six weeks.
Four months later, that approach has changed.
Santa Maria Public Works Director Brett Fulgoni said a design-build team brought in to study the structure found the scope of needed repairs kept growing, making the project too costly to continue as planned.
"Now that we've gone from a repair to looking at the demolish option, we have to engineer that," Fulgoni said. "So we were engineering to repair; we were going to do the repair, [but] it became too costly."
Fulgoni said the structure may not reopen in its current form.
"There may not be a reopening of the structure as it's currently sitting," Fulgoni said. "What we would do is demolish the structure and rebuild the parking lot."
Steel supports visible underneath the structure have been added as a safety measure while the city continues testing. Fulgoni is asking the public to stay out of restricted areas.
"If you see a closure zone, don't go past the closure zone," Fulgoni said.
Israel Sanchez, who works at the mall, said the limited parking is already affecting employees and shoppers.
"With us only having access to one floor space for parking, it makes everything a lot more limited because, you know, it not only affects the city but affects the workers that work here too because a lot of us drive," Sanchez said. "And when we drive here to come to work, and we don't have like a section of parking lot for only us, so we all share the public space."
Sanchez said the impact could become more noticeable as weekend traffic and the holiday shopping season pick up.
"It's gonna limit the amount of people that are in the mall because they're gonna see all the parking stacking up there, so they're not going to come shop," Sanchez said.
Despite the inconvenience, Sanchez said he understands why the city is taking a cautious approach.
"I'm kind of glad that they're extending it since they found out that we have like all these problems with it," Sanchez said. "It's better that they find it now instead of it like being a continued problem and something horrible happening, you know, that's preventing an accident."
Town Center General Manager Sylvia Palacios did not respond to a request for comment on the impact to the mall.
Fulgoni said engineers are now evaluating what demolition would involve. There is no timeline yet for what comes next.
