Parking deck subcommittee working on decision matrix

The Houghton parking deck subcommittee met Wednesday to decide on the best way to justify what its eventual recommendation will be. Commissioner Bill Leder provided the group with a matrix used to grade a Senior Design project at Michigan Tech and the subcommittee hopes to modify that to serve its purposes.

You can see the bones of the subcommittee matrix below.

Across the top, the columns are the different options before the subcommittee and the rows of the matrix are the criteria being used to grade each potential course of action. City Manager Eric Waara says the goal is to be transparent and show their homework, so everyone understands how a decision was reached.

At Tuesday’s meeting, the group generally agreed to the four options available, but said future discussions could provide alternative means of getting to the same result. Each of those would then need to be evaluated to determine the best route. Next they trimmed the considerations to better reflect the scope of their work.

Members Dan Liebau and Mike Needham argued that criteria like landscaping and green space should be limited to whether the potential is there in the future. Same with the item on increasing housing stock. Needham said the subcommittee’s concern is only with the broader issue to help satisfy a tenet of the Master Plan, not to try and steer specific projects into the space. Negotiations with the Planning Commission and City Council would help guide the requirements in a request for proposal that is put out to private developers.