City and county officials discuss property swaps, housing and downtown parking plans

Grants Pass and Josephine County leaders met to review ownership maps and to start exploratory talks about swapping or jointly developing city- and county-owned parcels to support housing, parking and departmental relocations. The meeting, called by the chair, ran from 11:04 a.m. to 12:04 p.m.

The mayor framed the conversation as an early-stage effort to “spark some more development” and suggested the county and city consider land swaps or joint ventures on underused property inside city limits. The mayor said one priority is downtown parking and proposed investigating a multilevel parking garage at the Grasshopper lot, describing a model where weekdays’ spaces could be leased to nearby businesses and weekends could be metered or free: “If you take the Grasshopper parking lot and you could put a 4 story parking complex in there … that’s a beautiful spot,” the mayor said.

Staff emphasized that the maps show county parcels primarily in northeast and northwest quadrants while most city-owned parcels are parks. Staff noted one project, the Allard Creek Reserve, where council involvement could yield about 180 residential units and explained the maps’ color coding and GIS layers to help identify candidate sites.

The chair said the county must relocate three departments after the sale of Dimock and urged putting county and city property managers together to evaluate existing buildings and suitable city locations, noting a one-year window once relocation agreements are executed: “When the papers are signed, the clock starts ticking. We’ll have a year to get this done,” the chair said.

Participants agreed that formal traffic and parking studies would be needed to justify a parking structure and to define demand. Staff recommended traffic counts and speed-trailer data, and pointed to prior downtown parking studies (some of which were affected by regional wildfire smoke during data collection). A committee member suggested combining city and county housing-permit reports so the public can track progress on housing targets.

Speakers also discussed school-district needs in South Grants Pass; one committee member said School District 7 likely needs a roughly 25-acre parcel for future capacity and urged coordination to identify sites that could serve both school and park uses.

No motions or votes were taken. Officials agreed to continue the conversation, to have staff pull past presentations (including a prior Dollar Mountain briefing) if the council wants a deeper look, and to convene property managers to identify candidate buildings or parcels for departmental moves and future collaborative projects.