What's with the Hidalgo County Courthouse parking?
Looking around the still relatively new Hidalgo County Courthouse in downtown Edinburg, which officially opened for business this past May, only approximately four years past its estimated completion date, there’s one thing still missing — a parking garage.
Or even parking spaces.
The summer heat is one thing when looking for a parking spot that could be blocks away from the courthouse; but with winter on its way, what are county staff, courthouse visitors going to do when and if a Blue Norther blows through?
Slick sidewalks, streets, driving cold rain, a windchill of even 40 won't be fun.
How did this happen? A new courthouse with no parking? The old courthouse standing just adjacent to the new one, which now stands where the old parking lot once stood.
Too many buildings. No parking. Confusion. Chaos. It’s a mess. Don’t take lunch and lose your parking space.
For his part, County Judge Richard Cortez said he’s not going to second guess anyone.
“I don’t want to second guess the prior administration that made this decision because it’s already happened. We’re having to deal with the situation that exists today, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
At the time when new courthouse plans were being bandied about, circa 2015, there were two main options — build a new courthouse downtown to replace the old one, or build out by north 281. There were several locations available. Some better than the rest, but they all had one thing in common — open land, open spaces.
Instead, Hidalgo County chose to build the new county courthouse downtown, just east of where the old one now still stands, initially completed in 1954. Completely obliterating the old parking lot in the process. Granted, the old parking lot wasn’t covered, but it sure beat having to drive around downtown looking for a parking space. For both visitors and staff workers alike.
Asked how he might have thought about the options – build downtown or out by the “expressway” -- if he had been county judge at the time, Cortez said:
“I think it would’ve been obvious to me that building a courthouse there (its current location) and removing the parking space to build a new courthouse was going to put a tremendous strain on parking.”
Especially with TxDOT slated to do work around the downtown area for the next decade, said Cortez.
Richard Cortez was sworn into office January 2019 after winning the March 2018 Democrat Primary.
All told, if you add together all of the parking spaces that the judge has in mind — 60 spaces here, 104 over there, 265 here and the 200 over there, then within two years time, the county will have 569 parking spaces downtown — there will be enough spaces in the future. So, hopefully that’s going to help, said Cortez.
“But parking is always going to be a problem. I do business in a lot of courthouses throughout the State of Texas, and I have never been to a courthouse anywhere in the state that parking is not an issue.”
Thankfully, relief for downtown parking is on the near horizon.
“We’re about to add 104 spaces on the Loeb and 13th property, which is just a little northeast of the courthouse, which is a property that we already own. Edinburg is now right in the middle of starting the construction of the parking garage, which is going to be 265 spaces. There’s going to be some interruptions, because there’s going to be the road closed, and two of the lanes on Closner will be closed. But anyway, there’s going to be an extra 265 spaces.”
Then comes next year.
“We will probably start demolishing the old courthouse after the turn of the year, and we plan on having 260 spaces there, of which 200 will be for jurors. So, jurors will be relieved,” said Cortez.
Edinburg Fiasco Fixed
Mayor Ramiro Garza, Jr., has this whole county courthouse business nailed down in his head. Before he was elected mayor in 2021, he was city manager between 2009 and approximately 2016, so he knows about the courthouse and its ties to the city going back way back.
“Way back when Ramon Garcia was a judge, there was a commitment by the city of Edinburg,” said Garza, Jr. “I was city manager then. Provide $30 million to the county as part of the courthouse improvements, that was the agreement.”
Then everything fell apart, but why not let the mayor tell the story, using bullet points, simply because this week’s deadline is fast approaching, and it takes time to write transitions between paragraphs.
Instead, we’ll allow bullet points, or in this case, hash tags, to highlight the mayor’s quotes. Always easier:
# “This is back in 2014, 2015 when they were in the planning stages. Right? But that ($30 million) could’ve been used for parking, it could have been used for a whole slew of things for the parking garage.
“But in 2017, as you know, there was a change in leadership. (The new mayor) Richard Molina said, ‘No, we’re not going to do that.’”
# “The city issued bonds in August of 2021, but they issued bonds for a whole slew of projects. It was over $20 million or so. And it was for the parking garage, it was for a cultural arts and event center. It was for drainage improvements, street improvements. A whole slew of improvements.”
# “All right, that was done in August of 2021.
“On Dec. 7th, 2021, a week before our runoff election day, the city selected ERO Architects as the architects for the parking garage. Obviously, there were no plans for the parking garage.
“Currently, there’s a candidate saying, ‘Well, we have 10 million for the parking garage.’And when I asked city staff where that numbers come from, ‘Well, that was a made-up number.’”
# “Yeah. That’s a reality. And those are all facts, that’s all there at the city. I inquired about this, people started calling me because we have candidates talking about that there’s the money missing. Of course, there’s no money missing, we just did the best we could (with the little the city was left with).”
# “My thing is just I want to maintain the city’s integrity. In this parking garage, that’s the reality of what happened, there were no plans (feasibility study). We had to... I got elected in December of ‘21, and by then ERO had been selected. Of course, city staff would negotiate it with them. And we ended up signing a contract with them in February of ‘22. So there were no plans; we had to get started.
“They started working on the schematic design. And right away, based on what the city had in mind, they said there was no way we could afford... I think it was 18 million that they wanted to do. They wanted to do retail on the bottom, all the bells and whistles of a parking garage. And I started to ask questions like, ‘Wait a minute. Well, how many parking spaces do we need? Where’s our feasibility study?” And it was only then that we found out there was no feasibility that had been done.”
# “And so our city council, I’ll be honest with you, this is over a year later, already late ‘23, because they had to do the schematic design. And the city council said, ‘Well, you know what, let’s take it out for a bid anyway.’ So they did. Well, of course, everything came out around that amount, the bids.
“I’ll be honest with you, the city council at the time was split. Some of them were like, ‘You know what, we can’t afford to do this.’ And of course, I’ve always been the mindset of we made a commitment, we need to come through with it. Let’s get creative, right?
“But we’re at a stalemate for a good six months to about a year that the council didn’t know because of the situation.”
# “Then over about a year and a half ago we brought onboard a group to help us do an assessment, kind of to do a project management of another project. And then we thought, you know what, why don’t we do that for the parking garage? And we selected to do a design-build method. And by then we had already finished construction of the cultural arts building. We had already done all these other things. What we had left was about $6.2 million. And I said, ‘That’s all we have left. We had to do within that amount.’
# “We got creative and made it efficient, and we selected design-build. Then, you know what, now we’re here with the team that was selected, they were able to negotiate. And we’ll still get about 270 parking (spaces), or something like that of what we committed to (with) the county.
“We’re going to get it done, man. The contract’s been signed, and we’re going to get started.
“I wish we could have done it sooner, but all that happened just as I described it to you… it took time.”