New downtown Mount Prospect building raises questions about parking

Plans for a new building on the former site of Busse's Flowers & Gifts in downtown Mount Prospect are raising questions about how the village will address the need for parking during a period of rapid development.

The issue came up Tuesday, when village board members viewed drawings of the two-story 18,500-square-foot structure that will replace the recently demolished building at Northwest Highway and Emerson Street.

The new building will have retail and restaurant space on the first floor, and retail and office on the second.

What it doesn't offer is parking. That will be handled off-site, some of it through an agreement village trustees approved to granting employees at the building permits for the village's Emerson Street lot.

Community Development Director Bill Cooney said the village has approved similar agreements for other downtown buildings.

Trustee Augie Filippone asked whether village staff planned to examine the impact of downtown development on parking.

Cooney said the village reviewed downtown parking roughly four years ago, concluding there were nearly 2,000 available spaces in the area, while maximum use was typically under 50%. The village will continue to monitor the situation, he added.

"We are going to have quite a few restaurants opening up over the next several months, which is going to be great," he said. "But ... it's probably going to create some pressure points in certain areas."

Cooney noted that with the exception of the Prospect Place building on Prospect Avenue, all the "vertical developments" downtown provide on-site parking.

Aside from the parking issue, village trustees and staff praised the design of the building at Northwest Highway and Emerson Street, which is faithful to the recently demolished building it is replacing, which was built nearly a century ago.

"Those renderings are just incredible," Mayor Paul Hoefert said of the design images presented to the village board Thursday. "To the naked eye, it looks like the same building."