The folks at Propark America in Hartford will be the first to admit that the words parking garage and sustainability aren’t often found together.
But the company is trying to change that.
“People don’t think of parking garages as the greenest, but (CEO) John Schmid has harnessed that as a way to differentiate ourselves and grow the company,” said Deane Gore, Propark’s corporate director of administration.
In Connecticut, Propark is at times overshadowed by the larger parking companies operating here, but that’s about to change. The company has more than 100 locations and 27,631 parking spaces in the state. Annually, about 7 million cars park in Propark facilities. Over the past five years, Propark’s revenue has grown by more than 7 percent per year and 2010 revenue beat 2009 by 11 percent.
Nationally, the company owns 75,000 parking spaces and parks nearly 19 million cars per year. Not bad for what was once just a small, Hartford-based company.
Particularly notable is the way the company has grown. Schmid has a serious commitment to the environment and his expanding parking empire is focused on growing without laying waste to the earth.
The United States is home to about 5 percent of the world’s population but produces about 45 percent of all vehicle emissions, according to the Environmental Defense Group.
The usefulness and convenience of the automobile is difficult to overstate. The country’s economy was, in part, developed around the automobile.
But cars are changing, and with them, so are the places we keep them when we’re not driving.
Drivers should notice some of those changes at Propark facilities.
There, they’ll find simple things like bicycle parking and recycling centers, as well as unique things like electric car charging stations called garage “juice bars.” Propark has about 20 electric car charging stations across the country and plans to install its first in Connecticut soon in New Haven.
Propark also claims the biggest “green” garage in the world in Denver, a 4,200-space facility at Canopy Airport. That garage is considered one of the greenest parking facilities in the world. It uses compressed natural gas shuttles; it’s powered by solar, wind and geothermal energy and it was built on an old landfill and makes energy from the methane gas the landfill generates. It was the first LEED certified “gold” parking facility in the country.
Back in Connecticut, drivers should start seeing some of these environmental components showing up at Propark facilities in the near future.
“Several juice bars will be in Hartford, and they’ll be popping up shortly,” said Gore. And they’re free.
In 30 years, Schmid has grown Propark into a firm that has more than $1.2 billion in assets under management and 400 locations across the country. He launched Propark’s real estate division, and the Green Park Development Co., which together own an interest in a portfolio of parking properties worth more than $40 million.
And like many other modern business, success and sustainability go hand-in-hand.
Schmid is chairman of the board of the nonprofit Green Parking Council, which he helped form. The council acts a lot like the LEED program, but is specific to parking facilities.
“its main focus is on the sustainable construction of parking facilities across the country,” Gore said. “It also helps garages become ‘certified’” at different levels, much like the LEED program, Gore said.
And it doesn’t end there.
Schmid is also involved with Garage Media, an outdoor digital advertising company that specializes in the use of green display technology. Instead of power-sucking traditional digital displays, those used by Garage Media employ LEDs. The most notable of these new displays is probably at the Port Authority in Times Square.
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