New parking deck at AU campus could spell relief for neighbors

Ray Collier of Brown Street has a ready answer when asked if there is a problem with students and staff from the nearby Augusta University campus parking on his street.

"Every day, Monday through Friday," said Collier, who has lived on the street "all of my life."

Relief for his neighborhood may be coming, but it could be a couple of years. AU was recently approved to build a $36.5 million parking deck on its Health Sciences Campus downtown. The new deck would add approximately 1,350 spaces for students, staff and faculty. Construction is expected to begin in December.

There is still much to be done in terms of planning and concept design but the current thought is it will have five levels of parking and be as tall as Elm Hall residential building that will sit next to it, said Dale Hartenburg, assistant vice president for campus services at AU, who oversees parking.

"It will be a big building," he said, looming over the intersection of Wrightsboro Road and R.A. Dent Boulevard.

The parking deck was in the 2015 Campus Master Plan and the need was brought to the forefront when construction began on a new building for the College of Science and Mathematics in 2019, Hartenburg said. Moving the college from the Summerville Campus to the Health Sciences Campus meant adding 1,400 students while eliminating a surface parking lot with more than 250 spaces.

It was about that time that Collier and others in the neighborhood began seeing students and staff clogging their streets. They had a meeting at Antioch Baptist Church to discuss the parking problem with members of the Augusta Commission. A plan would be put in place to address it, Collier said they were told.

"It wasn't," he said, and nothing has happened since. Collier has two orange parking cones on the curb in front of his house that helps some but otherwise it is constant traffic on the street, Collier said. It starts about 6:30 in the morning and goes to about the same time in the evening, he said.

Around the neighborhood, AU rents the 75 spaces in Antioch's lot and another 260 in the stadium lot for Laney High School, Hartenburg said. When AU broke ground on the new College of Science and Math building in 2019, they put in a proposal for a parking deck with the University System of Georgia, Hartenburg said. Then the pandemic hit.

They revisited the idea last year but had more work to do because of how much things had changed, Hartenburg said.

More:New parking deck approved for AU Health Sciences Campus

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"Trying to get an understanding of the cost for a project like this took a significant amount of work," he said. It was finally approved at $36.5 million but "on our draft from 2019, the project was only $27 million," Hartenburg said. It will be built as a public-private project, with $15.5 million coming from AU and the rest from bonds issued by Augusta University Foundation. The university system would then lease it from the foundation.

Hartenburg and his team oversee all of the roughly 11,000 parking spaces the university has scattered throughout but it is apparent there is a need for more. While he was talking on the sidewalk next to the future deck site, a parking enforcement officer in a golf cart was visible over his shoulder chasing down people trying to illegally park at a curb across the street.

"The team and I, this is our full-time responsibility," Hartenburg said. This past fall semester, about 50% of AU's residential students brought a vehicle with them when they showed up on campus, he said. And there is talk of adding another residence hall to the same campus, Hartenburg said.

The new deck "helps us facilitate future growth," he said.