Craig Bowen 
The $2 billion Mid-Coast Trolley extension, beneath creation via the San Diego Association of Governments, will have eleven miles of song connecting University City with the Santa Fe Depot downtown, nine new stations — and a few highly-priced parking locations.
SANDAG has spent $eleven.6 million acquiring two pieces of assets, one in Clairemont and the other in University Town Center, to be used for parking for 410 cars. That comes out to $28,293 in line with parking space. The corporation said the two land deals had to provide the parking called for in federally authorized plans for the transit task. It also stated that the two purchases were exact deals that prevented felony and other charges of the eminent area. The two transactions are among the dozen assets SANDAG has made in assembling belongings to create the rail line, facts supplied using the corporation display. They include acquisition as well as easement and right-of-manner agreements.
The most steeply-priced deal to this point turned into the San Diego Data Processing Corp at 5665 and 5675 Santa Fe Street. SANDAG purchased the building and land for $11.7 million, officials stated. The land offers are one detail of the challenge, which has been part of the overall transit plan for the place for close to many years. Project work began in the fall of 2016, and the carrier will start in 2021. SANDAG is paying $eight.6 million in one deal for an easement and parking shape on three. A five-acre piece of land on Morena Boulevard and Ingulf Street. The agreement includes a settlement from the land proprietor, Protea Development, to permit SANDAG to use the belongings for three years as a storage website to produce substances and devices for the undertaking, data show.
It’s also paying Protea for a hundred and fifty parking spaces for trolley riders in a parking structure the developer will build at the site for riders using the brand-new station, to be positioned across Clairemont Drive from the assets. SANDAG had initiated eminent area litigation to gather the land from a former landowner, who then offered the property to Protea for approximately $11 million, SANDAG spokesman David Hicks wrote in an email response to questions from The San Diego Union-Tribune.
Protea said it’d combat the eminent area effort; however, it provided SANDAG the whole lot it needed — parking and storage — as long as it may preserve and broaden the rest of the belongings. As part of a lawsuit Protea filed against SANDAG, court information said it might cost the company $7.9 million. Eventually, each facet reached a settlement beneath which SANDAG paid $eight.6 million for the one hundred fifty parking spots, a small piece of land for an electricity substation, and the brief garage. That is far less than what the organization may have had to pay thru eminent domain, below which it’d have had to pay the $eleven million Protea paid, plus any other predicted $2 million to build a surface car parking zone, Hicks said.
Meanwhile, on the northern cease of the line, SANDAG additionally placed down $three million for an easement to assemble 260 parking spaces at the Westfield UTC mall. That deal resolved a dispute wherein the mall owners contended that under a circumstance authorized for the unique development of the property, they only had to offer land of widening Genesee Avenue. SANDAG argued the situation required them to provide any land wished for the challenge, along with parking. The settlement averted every other eminent domain warfare, Hicks said. “Had SANDAG had to use eminent domain to collect the same assets rights, it might have cost everywhere between $nine million and $20 million,” he wrote. In general, the corporation has spent $83.2 million on land acquisition, near the $86.7 million budgeted for land acquisition. The organization, nonetheless has ongoing negotiations for approximately a dozen initiatives.
