Kalamazoo County is building a downtown parking garage at 440 N. Church St., with commissioners having set a guaranteed maximum price of about $26.8 million. The structure is meant for county employees, not for visitors to a planned downtown event center nearby.
The March vote and the later site work are laid out in reporting from MLive and a March 23 account from Now Kalamazoo. Together they put a precise price on a garage that sits inside a much larger county building plan.
A Price That Still Had Room
Commissioners voted on March 17 to set that guaranteed maximum and to approve contractors for the work. Now Kalamazoo put the figure at $26,825,136. The county administrator said the whole project would still come in under estimate.
That ceiling did not keep every bid at the cheapest number on the page. In four cases, the county chose local subcontractors even though doing so would cost a little more. Now Kalamazoo described the county’s local preference policy, established in September for local firms, and explained that it did not apply to subcontractors; the dollar gap was described only as a little more.
The garage line item also has a paper trail that starts well before the March meeting. The county board approved $590,800 in preparation work in July 2025. The Church Street property itself was a 2023 purchase, at $730,000.
County Employees, Not Event Crowds
Now Kalamazoo reported that the garage is being built to support employees at the nearby county administration building and the Judge Charles A. Pratt Justice Center. It is not being built for the downtown event center, even though the garage site is near that planned $515 million project.
The distinction matters on a downtown block where several big public projects can blur together from the sidewalk. This deck is county workplace parking, tied to offices and the justice center, rather than a public garage sized for arena nights.
MLive placed the garage adjacent to where the county plans to build a new administration building. A later MLive report described that building as coming with an attached parking garage, and put the combined estimate above $100 million. The building itself was expected to be about 120,000 square feet and around five stories.
Two Purchases, One Corner
The land math is not one check. The $730,000 Church Street buy is separate from a much larger acquisition at 224 W. Kalamazoo Ave. Kalamazoo County spent about $9 million to buy 224 W. Kalamazoo Ave. from McDonald's, MLive reported in its account of the downtown work.
City records and the construction calendar moved quickly this spring. A City of Kalamazoo site-plan listing says the parking-deck plan for 440 N. Church St., in the Central Business District, was approved on March 12. Five days later the county board approved contractors. By March 23, Now Kalamazoo reported the garage might break ground within the following few weeks.
On the afternoon of April 30, a dozer and other heavy machinery stripped the lot near the corner of Kalamazoo Avenue and Church Street, MLive reported. That clearing was framed as the start of more than $100 million in construction on the county's downtown site, with the administration building and garage as the planned pair.
How Many Stalls, and What Kind of Deck
Public descriptions of the garage do not yet agree on capacity. MLive reported that officials have said the new garage will have around 440 parking spaces. A ConstructConnect project listing describes approximately 400 parking stalls.
The listing is more specific about the building type: a new precast structure of five levels, with EV charging stations in select locations. Those chargers are not described as covering every stall, and neither account settles which space count the finished deck will actually deliver.
What is settled is the role of the deck in the county's downtown rebuild. A $26,825,136 garage on a $730,000 parcel, with a $590,800 preparation authorization, is part of a campus whose administration building and attached parking were estimated, together, at more than $100 million. The McDonald's parcel at 224 W. Kalamazoo Ave. shows how much of that campus is land as well as concrete.
