It took a while to get there, but Butler’s city council and redevelopment and parking authorities appear finally to be on the same page with plans for the Centre City project’s parking garage.

City officials at a joint meeting agreed Tuesday night to secure financing for the 225-space parking garage along South McKean Street. The city council vote was unanimous; neither authority raised an objection.

A month earlier, the parking authority rejected the redevelopment authority’s proposal for the three-tier, 225 space garage in favor of a cheaper surface lot, which would have been for the exclusive use of the Marriott Springhill Suites hotel that will anchor the Centre City development.

Downtown businesses and the Chamber of Commerce squawked at that, saying the new hotel would increase demands on downtown parking while taking away parking when construction begins soon in an existing parking area. And when asked to share the cost of the garage’s construction, the redevelopment authority, citing financial distress, threatened to dissolve and saddle the city with its heavily mortgaged assets that include Kelly Automotive Park and the Penn Theatre.

Tuesday’s joint meeting may have been crucial to the advancement of Centre City plans. It exposed all the varied financial figures, priorities, assumptions and objections and objectives between the authorities and council; and it simultaneously provided an opportunity for them to calibrate all of these same details.

These calibrations helped clarify the financial picture. City auditor Tim Morgus said they settled on an independent engineer’s formula of $19,600 per space to arrive at a $4.41 million estimate for the 225-space garage.

With a bond restructuring, and a $500,000 up-front payment from the parking authority, the garage bond issue will cost an estimated $5.5 million to $5.7 million.

And J.S. Capitol, the company overseeing construction of the hotel that it will co-own with the redevelopment authority, committed Tuesday to paying a guaranteed daily minimum of $5.50 per day for 50 of the garage’s 225 spaces. It will pay more on days when more spaces are needed.

Assuming that the new estimates, projections and commitments hold, and that construction bids are competitive, the city will still face an annuual shortfall of about $33,000. That likely will translate in parking fee increases. It’s just too soon to tell.

Tuesday’s meeting was crucial. It was a turning point for a downtown commercial development that was beginning to show signs of distress. It ended with a declaration from the man who convened the joint session, first-term Mayor Tom Donaldson: “We are going to build a parking garage ... We are going to move forward with this.”

Donaldson earns applause for the meeting and its outcome. It took the mayor 10 months to persuade everyone involved to agree on Centre City’s direction, but considering the apparent success, let’s hope it encourages better communication and coordination among the boards and commissions in city government in future efforts.