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Glenmont Station commuters can look forward to less when they park upon completion of a new garage in about a year.

Construction began Monday on a 1,200-space garage on the corner of Urbana Drive and Georgia Avenue that will ease the parking crunch at the station, which is slated to open in early 2012. The six-story garage will bump up the total number of parking spaces at the station by 67 percent to 3,000.

The garage costs $24.7 million, paid for by earnings from parking fees collected at Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority facilities in Montgomery County and county bonds, said Gary Erenrich, special assistant to the director with the Montgomery County Department of Transportation. The state contributed an additional $1.6 million for design costs.

Additional parking spaces are much needed at the Glenmont Station.

"It's one of the few garages in the system that there is still a waiting list," Erenrich said.

The existing garage is full most weekdays before 8 a.m., and more than 700 people are on a waiting list to buy one of the 180 reserved parking spaces there, said Patrick Schmitt, the senior traffic engineer for the parking division at WMATA in April.

Construction of the garage should not affect the daily commute, with the exception of the closing of a Kiss-and-Ride lot on the west side of Georgia Avenue. The east-side lot will stay open.

The Montgomery County Planning Board approved the forest-conservation plan for the garage in April, even though the project will destroy more than one acre of trees on the 10-acre plot of land. WMATA must plant two acres of trees somewhere else in the county to make up for the one acre — including seven large trees — the garage will pave over, according to the plan. WMATA is also required to create a minimum of 50 feet of forest buffering an adjacent Glenmont neighborhood from the garage.

Shady Grove, another end-of-the-line Metrorail station in the county, has 5,745 all-day spaces and 76 short-term metered spaces, according to Metro.

abryant@gazette.net