The single biggest-ticket item in Akron's budget for brick-and-mortar projects this year is a new downtown parking deck serving mostly the Chase and FirstEnergy buildings.

The deck would become the city's ninth public parking garage and is expected to cost $12.6 million, including about $900,000 to upgrade the existing Superblock garage already serving those buildings.

The new deck would park 700 cars and could be expanded to accommodate as many as 1,300 cars, depending on demand.

Construction is expected to begin this August and would last 18 months.

Fronting Dart Avenue, the new garage would fill about half of a strip of city-owned property between the Federal Building and the Chase Building, leaving room on the other half for a new office building on Main Street. The land currently is used as a surface parking lot serving the Federal Building mostly.

The city has pledged confidentiality regarding development of a new office building there, but improving the parking situation with a new deck would be an essential component of any deal.

And that situation isn't pretty for the businesses that crowd the existing Superblock garage, according to a study commissioned by the city that surveyed businesses in both buildings that use the garage as well as the government offices in the Federal Building.

The Superblock garage has 1,022 spaces on seven levels. Of those, 835 spaces are considered open to transient or nonreserved monthly parking.

FirstEnergy is the largest employer and has an agreement with the city to use 500 of the Superblock spaces. The company has 1,200 workers in its downtown building, however, and 580 of them park in surrounding facilities, according to the study.

``We have a waiting list with 240 employees requesting parking passes,'' the company said in the survey. ``Parking (both cost and unavailability) is one of the biggest complaints by employees when transferred to the general office downtown.''

If the 580 displaced FirstEnergy employees were squeezed into the Superblock garage, the resulting pinch on employee parking would leave a deficit of 527 spaces, according to the study, which doesn't take into account the demand for visitors.

Trouble for visitors

Between 376 and 469 people work in the Chase Building on any given day in a variety of professional offices, retail outlets and restaurants, according to the study. However, the real crunch affects the roughly 250 to 350 visitors a day, who complain that they have a hard time finding a convenient spot in the Superblock deck.

``Customers spend too much time in the garage looking for spaces,'' Rick Younkin of CL Davis Jewelers wrote on his questionnaire.

Tammy Ostrander of Tammy O's salon said her customers sometimes arrive late for appointments because they can't find convenient parking quickly.

``Parking has been a nuisance for my customers since Day One,'' she wrote in the survey. ``I have lost a lot of business because of parking. My customers are on time schedules as well. If they are too inconvenienced they won't come back. If one customer is late because of parking, this has a domino effect on my whole day.''

The Federal Building has 300 spaces under the building, but only allows its 145 employees to park in them. Because of Homeland Security restrictions, visitors are no longer allowed to park there. Visitors can range from 261 to 346 daily and they must find spaces in the adjacent surface lot (103 spaces) or on the street at meters.

Many of the visitors to the Social Security Administration have disabilities and cannot walk far distances.

The surface lot fills up quickly, according to the study, reaching near capacity between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on the day it was observed.

On the day that the consultant, Graelic LLC out of Cleveland, observed the Superblock, it found that parking spaces were available all day, but only on certain levels.

On Aug. 23, 2006, the consultant observed each level of the deck each hour between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m.

The deck's middle levels, which have the most convenient access to the buildings, filled up first.

Levels 1 and 2 had plenty of available spaces, but most of them were reserved. Nobody parked on the top deck, Level 7, which had 72 open spaces all day long.

That doesn't surprise city construction manager Jim Weber, who is overseeing the project.

``That's typical of parking decks,'' Weber said. In the summer, people don't want to park on the top deck because their cars will get too hot. In the winter, they don't want to fight the snow and ice.

Weber said that in addition to changing the signage and traffic flow through the existing deck, the city will explore ways to get more people to use the top level, perhaps by offering a discounted monthly rate.

``A discount will cover some inconvenience,'' Weber said.