Renovations planned by the owner of City Center spurred the White Plains Common Council to approve an ordinance allowing valet parking service in downtown areas by operators granted permits by the city.
Properly insured valet operators will be required to provide the service to the general public regardless of their destination. Vehicles will be parked within designated areas of public parking structures. And valet permits will only be granted where the use of public streets does not impede travel, interfere with rights of others or cause a public nuisance, according to the newly adopted law.
Council members at their Feb. 1 meeting approved the creation of the first designated valet drop-off area on the Mamaroneck Avenue block that fronts City Center, the four-level retail, restaurant and entertainment complex. The no-stopping area outside City Center will extend approximately 70 feet starting at a point about 180 feet north of Martine Avenue, according to the city”™s amended traffic ordinance.
Kite Realty Group Trust, the owner of City Center since mid-2014, hopes the valet service will attract new restaurants to vacant storefronts on Mamaroneck Avenue that had been leased by Legal Sea Foods and Applebee”™s. Legal Sea Foods closed its location in December 2013 rather than renew its lease after White Plains officials banned private valet parking service there.
“The city took away the valet parking, which made it untenable for us to continue operating in that location,” Ida Faber, vice president of marketing at Legal Sea Foods, said at the time of the closing. “We need a restaurant that”™s readily accessible for our guests. So had the city not done that, we may have stayed.”
Mayor Thomas Roach, a longtime advocate of valet parking legislation on the Common Council, said in the past, the unregulated valet service left some downtown visitors with parking tickets after valet drivers “drove around the corner” and parked their vehicles illegally on city streets.
“It has been tried before” at City Center, although not in a designated valet-parking lane, Roach told council members. “In this particular case, we have an opportunity to restore the valet without restoring the chaos.”
That restored valet service is essential to Kite Realty”™s planned improvements project this year at City Center, White Plains attorney David Steinmetz told the Common Council.
“Kite has received repeated interest from new restaurants that would like to come back into their space, but nobody wants to come back without the reintroduction of valet,” Steinmetz said. The valet service is needed to attract the more upscale restaurants that Kite wants to bring to City Center, he said.
Steinmetz noted the valet service area has been designed as a pull-off area under a canopy that still leaves two through lanes of traffic on Mamaroneck Avenue. “This is going to be a far better implementation of the valet” than in the past, he said. To succeed, the operation also will need an adequate number of allocated valet parking spaces in the City Center garage and enough valet workers to efficiently operate the service, he said.
“Kite wants the valet. Its tenants want the valet. No one wants a valet that”™s not going to work for those of us who frequent this (City Center),” Steinmetz said.
Councilwoman Milagros Lecuona said the valet parking ordinance was needed to keep pace with the city”™s changing downtown dynamics. Although she would have preferred a pilot project at City Center to first test the viability of the valet service, “I think it”™s going to be a parking management tool that”™s going to benefit the downtown,” she said.
“There has been an increasing interest and desire by a number of downtown businesses to provide valet parking services to their patrons,” Roach said after the council vote. “We know that many businesses view this service as a critical component to their success. However, we also know that if it is not done properly it can easily become a negative. This new ordinance addresses valet operations in a comprehensive way and ensures that such operations will be consistently structured and organized.”
Headquartered in Indianapolis, Kite Realty Trust Group acquired City Center, the company”™s first New York property, in a 2014 merger with another Midwest REIT, Inland Diversified Real Estate Trust Inc. of suburban Chicago. The deal was valued at approximately $2.1 billion. Inland Diversified in 2012 acquired a majority stake in City Center from Westchester developer Louis R. Cappelli, whose company a decade earlier launched the remaking of downtown White Plains with the $320 million, 1.1-million-square-foot City Center complex as its commercial centerpiece.
At Kite Realty, “We”™re looking to do a big renovation and just enhance the look of it,” said Robert McGuinness, asset manager for the company”™s Northeast region. “Valet is a big piece of it.”
McGuinness could not give a projected cost for renovations “in its infancy” in the city approvals process, he said. “We want to start and finish this year,” he said.
