The HERE @ Kansas apartment and retail project at 1111 Indiana St. is seen looking south from the intersection of 11th and Indiana Streets, Monday, March 14, 2016.

Developers behind the under-construction HERE @ Kansas apartments have provided the city of Lawrence with studies proving a parking garage, originally intended to be robotic, would work with human valets.

JDL Development, the group behind HERE, has also abandoned the idea for an additional parking garage at 1137 Indiana St. and has instead come up with a new solution to meet its parking requirements. Details will be shared in coming weeks.

Developers have been working to devise a new parking strategy since October, when Boomerang Systems Inc., the manufacturer of its planned automated parking garage, filed for bankruptcy protection.

“It’s been a horrific problem,” said James Letchinger, president of JDL Development. “The robotic parking not working out was one of the most expensive things I’ve faced in the last five years. We are solving it; that’s our job. We did not look to the city to solve it for us or let us out of any requirements.”

When developers in January presented their idea to have the already-built parking garage serviced by human valets, city commissioners had doubts about its feasibility.

In a three-hour discussion Jan. 26 with Jim Heffernan, a principal on the project, commissioners expressed concerns about the width of the parking spaces, which renderings showed to be a foot narrower than city code.

Commissioners also worried the parking would be so inconvenient that residents of HERE wouldn’t use it. The apartment and retail development is located at 1101 and 1115 Indiana St. in the Oread neighborhood, an area known to be congested.

The commission voted unanimously to defer a vote until their questions were answered.

Letchinger said Monday that since the meeting, JDL has “put forth a tremendous amount of research and effort.”

“I think at the last commission meeting we hadn’t anticipated all the questions, and we hadn’t done our homework as we should have,” Letchinger said. “We were put to task by each commissioner.”

Letchinger met individually with commissioners to answer questions, he said. The city also received a plan March 2 for how the garage will be operated, as well as a study commissioned by JDL about the garage’s feasibility.

The operation plan was put together by SP+, the company hired to be the garage’s operator. It states valets would staff the garage all day, every day, and it would take them three to six minutes, on average, to retrieve a vehicle.

Walker Parking Consultants, the company JDL commissioned to study the parking strategy, wrote in its report that the average stall size in five other operating valet garages was 7.5 feet — the smallest available in the HERE garage.

Scott McCullough, city planning director, said city commissioners would be asked at their March 22 meeting to approve the parking strategy. The parking garage will have 510 parking spaces, 77 fewer than what the robotic parking would’ve allowed.

At the Jan. 26 meeting, developers asked that they be allowed to fill all of the development’s 624 bedrooms before they secured the number of parking spaces required by city code.

In this go-round, developers aren’t seeking that exemption.

If the City Commission approves the new strategy, including 510 garage spaces and 108 on-street spots, JDL could lease all but 23 bedrooms. The development is expected to be complete in time for Kansas University’s fall semester.

Those 23 bedrooms, as well as the 13,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space in the development’s lower levels, must remain empty until more parking is secured.

“We do still need additional parking in order to activate the entire building,” Letchinger said.

To fill that parking void, developers first proposed razing an apartment building at 1137 Indiana St. and building a traditional, 96-vehicle parking garage. According to a news release from JDL, developers started looking at other options when concerns were expressed that the property at 1137 Indiana St. was historic.

Letchinger said JDL has developed a “satisfactory solution” to secure the necessary spaces, though he would not share Monday what the solution entailed. Because it’s a separate issue, he didn’t want that solution to be a distraction in the City Commission’s March 22 discussion, he said.

The plan would likely be announced in the next few weeks, he said. He added that it’s possible the extra parking could be in place by fall in order to fill the retail and restaurant space.

“We wanted to have this fully vetted and a solution in place before we go to the public with it,” Letchinger said. “We’re thrilled that we’ve finally gotten here.”

McCullough said that any parking plan proposed by JDL would have to be decided on by the City Commission.