London isn't the first city to explore using tax dollars to subsidize a parking garage downtown -- four years earlier it was tried in Windsor with disastrous results.

In 2002, it was hoped a new 408-space garage would attract office tenants to Windsor's downtown -- the rationale used by supporters of a public-private venture in London.

But in Windsor, rosy projections wilted, the venture went into receivership, another company bought the structure for private use and city taxpayers are out more than $3 million with the chance to get back only a small fraction.

In the late 1990s, investors in Windsor considered building a similar garage and hired a consultant who predicted there'd be a huge demand for parking -- about 600 spaces.

But at the new garage, only about 100 spaces were in regular use, bankruptcy trustee Stephen Funtig said.

There were a number of reasons Funtig believes the venture failed, among them, competition from a city garage and a rising Canadian dollar that kept Americans away.

One of the main culprits was the high vacancy rate in office buildings downtown. The hope had been the garage would reverse the trend; it was instead buried by it.

"Businesses are moving further from the core. People don't want to be downtown" Funtig said.

In London, a slim majority of council hope a garage here will help draw new commercial tenants and reduce the vacancy rate. In fact, that's the justification city staff use in a budget that points to a consultant's recommendation to spend $26 million on core parking in the next decade.

While the Windsor venture went into receivership 14 months ago, the head of London's finance, Vic Cote, says he hasn't reviewed what went wrong there but plans to.

"I want to look at the business model and see what went wrong. I'm getting a copy of the contract. I don't know what transpired. I'm not going to recommend (a garage) if the risks are too high."

Asked how a London parking garage could overcome the high commercial vacancy rate that torpedoed the Windsor garage, Cote said the London structure would serve the entire public and not just one or two companies.

But the Windsor garage was built to serve the entire public and was spoken of as a model for public-private partnerships when it opened.