The Bend City Council is working on a plan to revamp the North Mirror Pond parking lot downtown, between The Commons and Watershed Coffee, into a flex space that can double as an event venue.
“It’s got non-standard parking spaces in it right now. It needs to be redone. So this was actually an opportunity to use some of these tourism dollars to get a win-win, by upgrading the parking lot the way we need to but also creating a flexible space that we can use for things like the farmers market that we love,” Bend Mayor Melanie Kebler told the Source.
City staff met with downtown business and property owners who, they say, support the idea of a flex space to avoid closing Brooks Alley or downtown streets during smaller festivals. The plan would include a stage, permanent public restrooms, a covered trash receptacle with a compactor and a new surface that would deflect heat and provide better traction for pedestrians during icy winter weather.
It would be paid, in part, from transient room tax set aside in 2017 during a legal challenge, which was resolved in 2022. At that time, the account had $2.3 million. The flex plaza would cost about $4.2 million, with $2 million from the TRT fund and the rest from parking revenue.
Supporters say the space would fill a need for smaller events with up to 2,000 people that could be used year-round. City staff told councilors during a presentation on Oct. 22 that other small venues in Bend have grass and cannot be used year-round.
“I went down to Dia de los Muertos on Friday, and it had closed off the block on Minnesota, kind of near the Oxford, and it was not enough space,” Kebler says. “There were so many people. It was a great event, but people crowded all over on the sidewalks and everything. And, I was like, wow, this would be great to have in that flex space, because it would have a better stage and it would have a better ability to kind of hold the amount of people that wanted to attend that event. So it can be events that exist now and we might see more events if we have that space available for things like that.”
Kebler says no contracts have been awarded yet. Details still need to be worked out, such as the size of the restrooms and who will maintain them.
When the plaza is not being used for an event, it would continue to serve as a parking lot. The remodel would cause approximately eight parking spaces to be permanently lost, but Kebler says that would have happened anyway when bringing the current stalls up to code. The North Mirror Pond lot has about 80 spaces which would not be available when the space is used for an event. The City’s Parking Manager Tobias Marx says the average street festival held downtown blocks about 150 street parking spaces.
This article appears in the Source November 20, 2025.
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