By Ken Sain | San Tan News
The City of Chandler has settled a lawsuit and taken possession of the parking garage behind the LOOK Dine-In Cinema downtown.
The Overstreet Parking Garage opened in 2019 and the city had planned on purchasing it. However, the builder of the garage claimed the city missed a deadline to complete the purchase and wanted to hold on to the property and continue to lease it to the city.
“Kelly, great job to you and your team and our legal department for pulling this together, it’s a smokin’ deal for the city,” Councilman Mark Stewart told City Attorney Kelly Schwab. “Let me just break it down to numbers here. We got a great parking garage for community parking.”
“It’s a nice parking garage over by LOOK’s that will continue to be able to provide free parking downtown for all of our residents and people that love visit Chandler,” Stewart added.
The two sides agreed for the city to purchase it for $9.625 million. That’s about $1 million more than the city intended to pay the developer, DT Chandler. However, the developer intended to charge the city $65,000 a month in rent over the 27-year lease, which would have cost $21.2 million.
DT Chandler had filed a lawsuit in Maricopa County Superior Court a year ago, claiming the city had to notify the developer it intended to exercise its option to purchase the garage for $8,690,351 in writing at least 30 days before the third year of its lease ended.
