The Chelsea Planning Board recently recommended the approval of two related parking projects for Chicago-based InterPark.
The projects, when completed, will open up more than 11 acres of the company’s Eastern Avenue property for future development and tax revenue for the city.
InterPark has operated in Chelsea for over two decades, with a Park and Fly operation at 111 Eastern Ave. servicing Logan Airport passengers, and a separate parking garage at 270 Central Ave. that services airport employees.
InterPark is seeking to build a six-story parking garage on the northern portion of the 22-acre Eastern Avenue property.
That garage, according to InterPark representatives, would serve as the new garage for the Logan Airport employees, with approximately 2,400 parking spaces.
The existing garage at 270 Central Ave. is currently used for the Logan employees. That garage would be converted to the park and fly operation currently housed in the parking lots on Eastern Ave.
The Central Avenue garage currently has over 1,500 parking spaces. InterPark representatives said there would be no changes to the existing parking garage, other than some restriping to increase the size of the parking spaces, cutting the capacity down to about 1,460 vehicles.
The special permit requests are headed back to the zoning board of appeals on Tuesday, Sept. 8 for a potential final vote on the special permits.
InterPark consultants said the traffic analysis shows there will not be much new traffic generated on Eastern Avenue. In addition, the design team is looking at adding a traffic signal at the Bellingham Street intersection to help people on Bellingham Street get out of that street, as well as easing the left turns for the shuttle buses headed to the airport.
“Switching around the park and fly, bringing the Massport employees onto Eastern Ave. I think will do a lot of good and benefit that intersection,” said city land use and permitting director Will Cecio. “Thinking about the special permit for this project for a parking facility and the height, again, we feel it is meeting a social need, a community need giving parking to Massport employees and also, I think, there’s a traffic components to this too where it is providing a lot of traffic benefits to the the traffic flow in the area.”
The groundbreaking for the garage project is scheduled to get under way next spring with a two- to three-year construction period, according to InterPark officials.
“This project has been in the works for a very, very long time,” said City Manager Fidel Maltez. “The city worked on the municipal harbor plan to make this happen, and that took a few years.”
Maltez said he has been working to help move the project along since he became city manager two-and-a-half years ago.
“I have met with Massport many times on this move, because as you can imagine, they are very much the ones who are making this investment also,” he said. “They are in partnership with the city and InterPark, so there are a lot of players in this equation. I am really excited about the southern portion because what it does is it unlocks, for, I hope, more taxes and more revenue that can then allow us to do more programming elsewhere or build more parks.
“But that is a conversation that I think is going to happen later on, and obviously involves the sale of the property to another entity.”
The project will help Chelsea maximize the use of an underutilized part of the city, Maltez said.
“I have heard a theme that we want to see more industrial development in the waterfront, so this is it,” he said. “This is development where we have heard what the community wants to see and it is relatively low impact in terms of affecting neighbors or creating additional traffic on our streets.”