A large hotel and mixed-use development planned for Rehoboth Beach moves ahead after lengthy discussion about the nuances of building a parking garage.
The One Rehoboth project would build a 60-room hotel with commercial space on the bottom floor. Below that would be an underground parking garage with 63 valet parking spaces for hotel guests. At a meeting of the Rehoboth Beach Planning and Zoning Commission, the developers were back with some updated plans based on recent exploration of the underground landscape, using ground-penetrating radar.
Wally Funk, an architect working on the project, said that the results of that exploration led to changes in the building’s footprint, moving it away from the site’s next door neighbor, the Admiral Inn.
“Being further away is a good thing for this project in terms of minimizing risk, both to us and to the Admiral,” he explained.
The parking garage is designed to be just one level, but by using car lifts, can accommodate 63 vehicles by stacking them two high.
“With this arrangement and these lifts, we can still park two standard SUVs stacked or a standard [SUV] and a minivan in each one of these. And then we can also stack a large SUV - an oversized - with a sedan up above it,” Funk said. “So essentially, that's what gives us the 63 spaces. It's got a lot of flexibility in the system to make that work.”
That lift system led to a lengthy grilling from Planning Commission members, who peppered the development team with questions about what happens if more than half the vehicles are too large for those spaces. Attorney Vince Robertson, representing the developers, explained that the garage would be manned by valets, who could shuffle vehicles around to take advantage of the lift system as necessary. He added that oversized vehicles represent less than three percent of passenger vehicles on US roads.
“I appreciate the concerns, but we're speaking in hypotheticals. We just sort of checked, and right now, the large-size SUV population in the United States is only 2.7% of vehicles in the United States,” he said. “So unless everybody who has an Escalade is going to decide to come to this place all at once, you know, it's a real concern, but it's an unlikely event.”
Debate around parking for large vehicles dominated much of the nearly two hour discussion. Planning Commissioner Julie Davis brought up another concern - vehicles with roof racks.
As the back-and-forth continued, Robertson stressed his opinion that the scenarios planning commissioners were creating were very unlikely.
Again, we're getting down a rabbit hole here that assumes that there's not a ground-level space that's available in the first instance, that we have full capacity, that there's more than 30 large-size SUVs.” he said. “I mean, there's like five or six things that need to happen before we'd ever be even talking about that.”
He also noted that the hotel would be able to get on-street parking permits from the city that it could use for overflow.
Seven planning commissioners voted to move the plan forward, with Davis and Michael Strange abstaining. Davis said that, despite a long list of conditions attached to the approval, she didn’t feel as though she had enough information to vote.
The project still faces several more votes in the future as the planning and design phase continues.
