Mason City council approves sale of city parking lot for apartment project

MASON CITY — The City Council in Mason City on a four-to-two vote Tuesday night approved selling the city parking lot at the corner of 1st Street Northeast and North Delaware so a 36-unit mixed-income apartment building can be constructed on a portion of the lot.

DevPartners, who is also developing an 11-unit townhome-style building currently at the corner of 2nd and North Federal, wants to place the apartment building on the property, which would include an indoor parking lot with 23 spaces and an outdoor lot with around 50 spaces for public use and parking lease. Some business owners in that area during a public hearing objected to the project, saying parking spots would be taken away from their customers and that there’s a parking issue downtown.

City Administrator Aaron Burnett says a three-month study of the parking lot by the city showed it was being under-utilized. “Surface parking when it’s under-utilized attracts criminal elements. It is no benefit to the downtown. It does not produce taxes. It’s an operations and maintenance problem.”

Burnett says the end goal is to maintain the use of the spots for people who use that parking lot, and the configuration will stay similar in the proposed layout of that lot.  “It would maintain two-hour spots adjacent to Reflections. It would maintain two-hour spots adjacent to Bare Sugar. While there’s to be setback from Delaware, there would be within about 30 feet of Bare Sugar. Obviously Three on a Tree has on-street parking that’s heavily utilized and some of those businesses along 2nd. The four-hour spots, we will move some of those to the interior where there’s currently two-hour parking that doesn’t get utilized. That will essentially take away two-hour parking that rarely ever gets used.”

Councilman Will Symonds says despite the parking questions, the project is a net positive.  “I understand not liking a project, I just don’t know what else we would do instead of this. I know that downtown housing is in need and has been an objective of ours for years, and I feel like we have a net positive here with this project.”

Councilman Paul Adams says the project helps address a common goal of the council for the last several years of addressing housing needs in the community.  “The city paid for a housing study a year or two ago that showed we were between 600 and 700 units short in Mason City for housing, and that’s not all apartments. Apartments make up some of that number, but it can’t be all apartments, but apartments are what we’re talking about tonight. The minute we get a proposal from a developer on single-family homes, or twin-homes, or duplexes that want to come to Mason City and build those, I will fully support that one too, because it has to be a mix, and this proposal tonight just happened to be the one that came forward.”

Councilman Joshua Masson voted against, saying it’s not a good spot for the project.  “I’ve heard arguments from the crowd, and I’ve heard arguments here, and I don’t think I’m convinced this is a good use for this spot. I think there’s too many negatives. I get the positives to it. I don’t think this is a good use for this spot. I know we have parking downtown. I think these are great developers. I just think we can do better and I don’t think this is a good use for this spot.”

Councilman Tim Latham voted against, saying it wasn’t a very good use of the parking lot and that there needs to be more of an emphasis on housing construction in the community.  “I wish it wasn’t four stories, that’s my take. Actually I’d like to see it built over at the City Hall parking lot and stretched out further, but that’s up to the developer where they want to build.”

The council on the same four-two vote approved a development agreement that provides an annual rebate of the incremental taxes for 15 years, not exceeding a total of $850,000.