The City of Omaha will spend $30 million to build a 750-space public parking garage for the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Catalyst project and other developments west of Saddle Creek Road.
City officials expect the cost will be repaid by parking revenue generated by Catalyst, UNMC’s CORE administration and research building and other future developments.
The garage will be near 46th and Emile Streets, between Catalyst and the CORE Building across Saddle Creek Road from UNMC’s main campus.
“There’s a lot of things that will utilize that garage,” Assistant City Attorney Jennifer Taylor said. “We’ve talked to our parking consultants, and we feel comfortable that the amount of spaces and what we can charge will be sufficient to cover our debt service.”
The Omaha City Council voted Tuesday to approve an agreement with GreenSlate Development and Koelbel and Co., the developers of Catalyst. Under the agreement, the developers will build the garage on land leased from the university. The city will own the garage.
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The city previously committed to building the garage as part of its interlocal agreement with UNMC for the development of the former Omaha Steel Castings industrial site.
The 170,000 square-foot Catalyst is currently under construction, using the bones of the former steel plant. Catalyst will house the 40,000-square-foot UNMC Innovation Hub. The hub, in turn, will bring together UNeMed and UNeTech, UNMC’s development arms, in a medically centered incubator space intended to foster collaboration among inventors, entrepreneurs and others.
Catalyst also will include 130,000 square feet of space for businesses, an event center, a food hall, a market, a beer taproom and a restaurant. Big Grove Brewery, based in Iowa, recently announced plans to open a taproom and restaurant at Catalyst in spring 2025.
The Catalyst building will be done by the end of this year, said Jay Lund, principal of GreenSlate. The garage will be built by summer of 2025, he said. Residential and commercial development will follow, Lund said. The details are yet to be determined, but city officials expect apartments will rise near the parking garage.
Also Tuesday, the City Council made no attempt to override Mayor Jean Stothert’s veto of its ordinance to criminalize parking on residential lawns in the city. It would have taken a supermajority of five votes to override it.
But council member Ron Hug, who had introduced the measure, said: “This ordinance is not dead.” He took Stothert’s letter with her veto as an acknowledgment that parking on grass outside homes is a problem, and said he’ll talk with her about how the ordinance can be reworked to win her support.