By Gregory Korte
The Cincinnati Enquirer

"Unworkable and bordering on silly" is what Cincinnati Mayor Charlie Luken called his vice mayor's plan to shuttle Kroger employees from the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal to the downtown Kroger Building.

The plan would save the city $12 million on a new parking garage at the corner of Vine Street and Central Parkway, Vice Mayor Alicia Reece said Thursday.

But her alternate plan to resolve Kroger's parking crunch seemed to have little support inside or outside of City Hall, where City Council is scheduled to vote Wednesday on plans to build the 850-space deck at Vine Street and Central Parkway, across from Kroger's headquarters.

Instead of paying $510,000 a year to the city to help maintain and pay off the garage, Kroger would pay that money to the Museum Center, which has a 1,000-car parking lot in the West End, Reece said. The rest of Kroger's 1,400 downtown employees would have to find parking at scattered sites downtown, as they now do.

"We shouldn't be in the parking business," Reece said. "There's no such thing as free money, and somebody's got to pay down the debt."

Reece provided no figures on the cost of the shuttle and the added security she's proposing, but said, "I'll tell you this: it will be a lot less than $12 million."

Kroger called the Reece proposal "a very creative solution, but not a very practical one."

"We appreciate that the vice mayor recognizes we have a parking crunch that needs to be addressed," said Lynn Marmer, Kroger's group vice president for corporate affairs. "It's just not very practical to think that on a permanent basis we could have that kind of long-distance parking situation."

A short written statement from Museum Center President Douglass W. McDonald was non-committal. "Cincinnati Museum Center is willing to cooperate in any way that is beneficial to retain Kroger's current corporate headquarters."

Reece's proposal seemed to take all of the major players by surprise.

"The Museum Center called me and said they didn't know anything about it," Luken said. "Nobody called me. Nobody called Kroger. Nobody called the city manager."

Reece said it was not her job to work out the details. "I'm proposing this to the administration because they took the lead in the negotiations," she said at a news conference at the entrance to the Museum Center Thursday.

E-mail gkorte@enquirer.com