By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

A prominent doctor says a proposed 15-storey parking garage and residential condo complex on Collins Avenue represents his contribution to solving what he described as a “national parking dilemma”.

Dr Conville Brown, principal of The Bahamas Heart Centre, Cancer Centre Bahamas and The Medical Pavilion Bahamas, told a public consultation staged by the Town Planning Committee that his Collins on Sixth Commercial Complex was an effort to address the inadequate car parking that plagues many businesses and retail/office complexes.

He explained that his various medical businesses, all located close to the proposed development, must provide more available parking space for their cancer, heart disease and kidney disease patients. “We are here because we have a national parking dilemma,” Dr Brown said.

“Our initiative has a parking dilemma and, by extension, it is safe to say we have a national parking dilemma. And by that I mean most Nassau-based businesses do not have adequate parking, whether it is medical or commercial. That seems to be a common theme.”

The parking garage and condo complex, if given the go-ahead by Town Planning, will be adjacent to a six-storey commercial building that Dr Brown’s CSB5 Commercial Property Company is presently constructing. That will house Royal Bank of Canada’s (RBC) relocated Palmdale branch once completed, as well as office rental space and a restaurant on the top floor.

The total project will comprise of 18 lots and 125,000 square feet and three acres in total in the Collins Avenue and immediate area. “The commercial complex will be sitting on eight lots and that’s some 50,000 square feet, and the plans would be to expand that to 600,000 with the tower, and of course for the medical pavilion that’s sitting on 10 lots and that has 80,000 feet anticipated of development and sitting on 70,000 square feet of land,” Dr Brown said.

“The present building is phase one,” Dr Brown explained, “and the only thing we’re expecting to do with that is add another two or three floors on the commercial building.” The condominium element, he confirmed, is designed to help defray the costs of constructing the parking garage.

The meeting heard there was no possibility of creating a 20-foot setback from the street because this would not have allowed cars to access the parking garage. This led to the decision to increase the commercial building’s height, as well as construct the multi-storey parking garage, as there was insufficient space to meet the Building Code requirements for a project of this scale and complexity in the Centreville area.

Prior to the Building Code revision, the parking requirements for the six-storey commercial complex would have been 313 spaces. However, the change increased this to 450 spaces. Incorporating an extra three floors for the Medical Pavilion would then increase the parking requirements to 629 spaces under the old Code, and 914 spaces using the new version.

Before going vertical, Dr Brown had only identified 200-plus parking spaces. The 10-storey facility was thus the only option for complying with the Building Code requirements.

Dr Brown said: “The CSP Five group wishes for the commercial and medical complexes. We would like to have a five to six-storey commercial building. It’s now worth four storeys. We’d like to take that up to six… The 10-storey parking deck, if you can only get 60 spaces per floor, you literally need 10 storeys just to get 600. That’s an expensive way to get 600 spaces, extremely expensive.” There were no general objections to expanding to 15 storeys.