At Monday night’s meeting, Kingston city council approved the purchase of the parking lot at Ontario and Brock streets for $6.2 million. The property is the last undeveloped land near city hall.
The city purchased the property from Arnon Corporation, an Ottawa-based land developer.
Kingston Mayor Bryan Paterson says he’s thrilled with the deal.
“This is the last piece of property in the vicinity of the city’s core and that makes it a tremendous opportunity to do something very special with the property,” said Paterson.
The mayor calls the acquisition a “win-win” as the city will easily make its money back through parking revenue.
But the long-term future of the site is yet to be to determined.
“Could we put a parking garage of some kind on that site? I think we can explore that. What I can say is that at a high level we do need more parking in the downtown.
“We are losing some of our existing surface parking lots to new developments so we have to have a plan to replace that parking — we’re exploring a number of different options that might take us there.”
The mayor says he can’t see anything happening in the next few months but at least the process has begun to take advantage of the site and the best options for it.