Local news

Northampton pushes Armory Street garage repairs to spring

The city council voted 6-3 to delay the deck work, and the two lower levels stay closed through the winter.

By Dana Whitcomb · August 14, 2026

The Northampton City Council voted 6-3 on Thursday night to hold off on repairs to the Armory Street parking garage until spring, which leaves the bottom two levels of the garage fenced off through a second winter.

The vote came shortly after 10 p.m., at the end of a meeting that ran three and a half hours. It follows a structural report the city commissioned in March from Harkness Engineering of Springfield, which found corrosion in the tensioning cables under the second-level deck and told the city to keep the two lower levels empty until that deck is repaired or replaced.

The garage has 412 spaces. The closed levels account for 168 of them, and they have been closed since April.

"I do not like this and I want to be clear about that," said Councilor Bea Lunsford of Ward 3, who voted with the majority. "We can spend four and a half million dollars in November and hope concrete cures in the cold, or we can spend it in April and get a warranty that means something. I am voting for April."

One bid, and it came in high

The city put the deck work out to bid in June and got a single response. Cordova Construction of Chicopee quoted $4,610,000, against the $3.15 million the capital plan set aside for the job in fiscal 2026. Two other firms took the bid packet and did not return it. Purchasing director Ellen Rask told the council that one of them called to say it could not staff a winter pour on that schedule.

Mayor Ruth Ainsley's office had asked the council to authorize the extra $1.46 million from free cash and start in October. That request is now dead until at least February.

Public works director Manny Ocasio said his department will rebid the job the second week of January, when contractors are setting their spring schedules and tend to price work more cheaply. He put the odds of a lower number at "decent, not certain." He also said the department will keep inspecting the closed decks every 30 days and after any storm that drops more than eight inches of snow, and that the top deck will be posted with a weight limit and cleared by hand crews rather than the big plow.

The three votes against

Councilors Aaron Petrossian, Frida Okonjo and Lem Bartell voted no, all of them on the same grounds: another six months of 168 missing spaces on the wrong end of downtown.

Petrossian, who represents Ward 5, put the parking revenue loss at about $31,000 a month and said the real cost is the part nobody bills for.

"People drive up Armory, see the barrels, and go to Hadley," he said. "They do not write us a letter about it. They just go."

Merchants have been saying the same thing since spring, with varying degrees of patience. Corinne Adamik, who has run Adamik Stationers on Pleasant Street for nineteen years, said her Saturday traffic is down about a fifth from last August and that she does not blame the garage for all of it.

"Half of it is the economy and half of it is the parking," Adamik said. "But the parking is the half the city can actually fix, and now they are telling me May. I have already ordered Christmas."

How the garage got here

The garage opened in 1978 and got its last major repair in 2004, when the city replaced the expansion joints and resealed the top deck. A 2019 condition survey rated the structure fair and recommended deck work within seven years. That recommendation sat in the capital plan behind a school roof, a fire truck and the Bridge Street culvert, and it moved up the list only after a chunk of concrete about the size of a dinner plate came off the second-level soffit last February and landed on an empty car hood.

Nobody was hurt. The city closed the two lower levels eight weeks later.

Lunsford, who has sat through most of the meetings on this, said the lesson is dull and old. "We deferred maintenance for twenty years and now we are deferring it another six months, and every one of us knows what that does to the number," she said. "It goes up."

What happens between now and spring

The top two levels and the street-level spaces stay open, 244 spaces in all. The Center Street lot keeps its 40 free two-hour spaces, and the city will again suspend enforcement in the municipal lots on the four Saturdays before Christmas.

Ocasio said the January bid will be written a little differently. Instead of asking for a full deck replacement, it will price replacement and repair as separate items so the council can see both numbers side by side before it commits. He expects a construction start in late April and a reopening of the lower levels sometime in July, assuming the winter inspections turn up nothing worse.

The council's next regular meeting is Thursday, September 3, at 7 p.m. in the City Hall chambers on Main Street. The 30-day inspection reports for the garage are posted on the public works page of the city website, usually within a week of the walkthrough, and Ocasio said anyone who wants the raw engineering report can ask his office for a copy and get one.