Santa Monica is laying the foundation for a $92 million remake of its downtown parking garages.

Late last month, the City Council gave its staff permission to investigate a dozen properties in downtown Santa Monica for potential locations to build new parking garages. The city wants to tear down three of its smaller parking garages that contain 981 spaces to replace them with larger, more modern structures.

Before that can take place, the city wants to build one or two new parking structures that could balance out the parking deficit caused by knocking down the three decks.

When completed, Santa Monica wants to add 1,700 new spaces to the 6,500 spaces it already provides in its downtown, defined for parking purposes as bounded by Second and Sixth streets and Broadway and Wilshire Boulevard.

“The plan was to get more structures and rehab the ones we have, or some combination of the two,” said Councilman Herb Katz. “We are trying to acquire property so we can build parking structures to alleviate (parking) problems.”

The structures are inefficient, poorly designed and constantly backed-up as drivers wait for others to pull into and out of spaces, said Katz, an architect. The new garages would have space on the ground floor for shops and restaurants.

The other idea being floated is to sell or ground-lease the locations of the current parking garages to developers who would build modern movie theaters with stadium seating, he said.

“It may be better to take that land and get theaters in there,” Katz said. “All theaters downtown need upgrading. We need bigger, more modern theaters with stadium seating so we can stay competitive.”

But that would require buying replacement sites where new parking garages could be built. Those lots wouldn’t come cheap; vacant land in downtown Santa Monica can cost as much as $400 a foot. The result would be to steeply increase the cost of the city’s parking plan.

Jeff Mathieu, the city’s resource management director, said Santa Monica has funds available if needed. There’s still $5 million in Federal Emergency Management Administration funds leftover from the 1994 Northridge earthquake. There’s also about $100 million in the city’s Redevelopment Authority that could be tapped, he said.

Katz said he would like to see the city begin building the new parking structures within five years, a timeline that Mathieu says is possible.

“We would like to do it quickly,” Katz said, “but nothing in this town gets done quickly.”

Santa Monica has already begun adding to its overall public parking supply, building several hundred new spaces in the new main library that’s currently under construction and a new municipal garage behind City Hall and the adjacent Los Angeles County Superior Court building. The projects will add 900 new parking spaces.

The plan was enacted about two years ago on the recommendation of a downtown parking task force, which conducted field analysis and polled downtown businesses and others.

Public parking decks are routinely filled on weekends and the task force consisting of City Council members, residents and business representatives found Santa Monica could have a dearth of parking within a decade’s time.

“When it comes to parking, the equilibrium between supply and demand is one we always find challenging,” Mathieu said. “We don’t want to wait to do anything until there is a parking problem because then it would take a decade before there could be a solution.”

To raise the $92 million for the construction, the city plans to hike parking rates and increase assessments on downtown Santa Monica property owners and developers adding square footage to their buildings. The city also expects to raise funds by renting out shops on the deck’s ground floor.

“If the cost of implementation of the downtown parking plan were to exceed $92 million, we would turn to the city’s redevelopment agency to provide assistance for the replacement of those parking structures,” Mathieu said.

After considering an array of downtown Santa Monica parcels that would make good locations for new parking garages, Mathieu proposed about a dozen properties as candidates.

With the City Council’s approval, city staff workers will contact some of the owners of the targeted properties to gauge their interest in selling their land.