After a sometimes tense, more than an hour-long discussion Thursday night, the Pensacola City Council unanimously approved advertising two key parcels under the West Main Master Plan calling for a parking garage on the site.
The city needs to advertise that it is open to proposals to lease the two properties under the West Main Master plan after Silver Hills Development Inc. walked away from its lease option agreement for the two parcels last month.
Promoters of the West Main Master Plan have said that getting some type of parking garage built on the two parcels, called parcels No. 4 and No. 5, is key to making the rest of the West Main Master Plan financially and logistically feasible.
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Lee Altman, project manager at landscape architecture firm SCAPE, said Wednesday that the design on display next week will be an evolution of initial idealistic renderings that have been fine-tuned taking into account such logistics as utility lines and parking.
“The drawings we developed earlier were highly conceptual and trying to make sense of what the vision was, and (the new design) is really bringing that vision down to earth, understanding what can fit where,” she said.
SCAPE was tasked in late 2019 with studying ways to make the downtown waterfront more vibrant, and how to invest money into development that would see the biggest return for the community.